Mehdi hasan

Conservative commentator and 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky found his punditry gig at CNN to be short-lived after the network kicked him off air Monday for making a joke about Hezbollah’s exploding pagers. Girdusky was sparring with two progressive co-panelists, Ashley Allison and Mehdi Hasan, on CNN Newsnight over whether Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden could be reasonably equated to the 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue. Girdusky asserted that Democrats were smearing Trump’s supporters by accusing them of attending a Nazi rally, to which Hasan replied, “If you don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing — stop saying,” presumably meaning to end that sentence with “Nazi things.

MSNBC has finally found a host that's de trop for them. Outspoken critic of Israel Mehdi Hasan had his show canceled by the network. Semafor announced the shake up on Thursday morning as part of broader changes to MSNBC’s weekend programming. Hasan’s show has been canceled but he will remain with the network as an on-camera analyst and fill-in host. Ayman Mohyeldin’s program will expand an hour to replace the vacated slot.  Hasan has been one of MSNBC’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine. During a November 16 interview with Israeli government advisor Mark Regev, Hasan attempted to get his guest to agree that Israel has wittingly killed children.

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC has a plagiarism problem. It appears that, as with the cases of John Oliver and James Corden, Britain is not sending its best. The pundit also seems to be as much of a chameleon as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, taking whatever position gets him ahead. Lee Fang, a reporter formerly at the Intercept, published an investigative piece on his Substack looking at Hasan’s journalistic (or, maybe, not-so-journalistic) history. "Writing" an article in 2000 taking up the cause of spanking disobedient kids, he took — almost to the letter — the text from a 1998 article in US News and World Report. A few alterations here and there to account for the difference in date, and voila!

I have spent most of the last fortnight debating Islam and blasphemy and wanted to take the opportunity to put down a few unwritten thoughts. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris atrocities most of the people who thought the journalists and cartoonists in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ kept their heads down.  I encountered a few who did not, including Asghar Bukhari from the MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee).  In the aftermath of the atrocity Asghar was immediately eager to smear the cartoonists and editors of Charlie Hebdo as racists.

On Sunday there was a rally in London demanding ‘zero tolerance’ of anti-Semitism. About 4,500 people gathered in front of the Royal Courts of Justice. Speakers who addressed the crowds included the Chief Rabbi, Maajid Nawaz and me. Among the things I told the crowd was to expect more and to demand more of their ‘communal leadership’. Long-term readers will know that I’ve never had much time for communal leadership of any kind. I don’t like the groups who claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims – groups which disproportionately represent a politicised and fundamentalist hard-line interpretation of their faith.

I was attacked by a swan the other day, as I walked along the bank of the River Stour in Kent. The creature climbed out of the water and lunged towards me, wings puffed up, making this guttural and hate-filled coughing noise. I kicked out at its stupid neck and told it to fuck off and the bird backed away towards the river, still making that demented hissing, like a badly maintained boiler. At first I was mystified as to how I had gained its enmity. I wasn’t near its mate and still further distant from its sallow and bedraggled idiot children. Nor had I advanced towards it, or even given it a threatening glare. And then the horrible realisation dawned on me. The swan had attacked me because it believed — mistakenly — that I was Jewish.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_March_2014.mp3" title="Quilliam's Maajid Nawaz discusses reforming Islam with Freddy Gray" startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer]I am not a moderate Muslim, I am a reformist. Rooting out corrupt practices can never be an act of mere moderation. Restoring integrity, or wholeness, is always a radical act. It transcends notions of left and right, emphasising the need to think independently. In Islam, independent thought has a strong history, not that you’d know it from the news about bombings, beheadings and bloodshed. ‘Jihad’ has become part of the West’s vocabulary and with good reason. But there is a lesser-known term in Islam — one that has the capacity to change the world for good.

I have a letter in this week’s New Statesman. It is a response to an article in last week’s magazine by Mehdi Hasan. As NS Letters appear not to be published online I am pasting it here: Sir, The piece by Mehdi Hasan in last week’s magazine (‘Who needs Tommy Robinson and the EDL, when Islamophobia has gone mainstream?’) tries to infer that statements by various writers, including myself, are identical to those on show at some EDL demonstrations.   For instance he quotes some EDL supporters caught on camera chanting: “Burn the mosque!” and then quotes me as calling for ‘mosques accused of spreading “hate” to be “pulled down”.’  Mehdi then says ‘Spot the difference?

I had never really understood the acronym ROTFLMAO properly until I read about the wretched Mehdi Hasan and his hypocritical denunciation of the Daily Mail, after having applied with cringing desperation to the same paper for a job. (Dacre told him to get lost, which is to his credit). My colleague Nick Cohen has filed an excellent analysis of this business, to which you should be directed if you yourself haven’t also had the opportunity to ROTFLMAO. But at least Mehdi will be in no trouble with his religion. He is, of course, famous for quoting the Koran to the effect that unbelievers are regarded as “cattle”. And by the same logic it is perfectly ok for a Muslim to lie to a non-believer; it falls under the terms “taqiyya” or “kitman”.

When David Cameron announced ‘state multiculturalism has failed’, the chattering classes gasped in disbelief. Here was a Prime Minister, bull dozing his way into  the tricky area of immigration — one his predecessors had shied away from. The speech was praised by the right, and lambasted by those on the left — including his coalition partners. David Goodhart received a similar reaction with the publication of his book  The British Dream. In it, he examines the success and failures of post-war immigration in Britain. On the right, the book was welcomed as a thorough examination into multiculturalism.