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Mehdi Hasan Defends Fatima Mohammed
JUN 13, 2023 10:00 AM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
Jihad Watch
Mehdi Hasan is a cocky, unpleasant, shallow man, a Muslim import from the U.K .whose resistible rise in journalism will put many in mind of a Muslim Sammy Glick. In the U.K., he first came to the attention of the public for taking part in a debate held the Oxford Union in 2009, where he argued for the proposition that “Islam is a religion of peace.” A majority voted for the resolution, agreeing that yes, indeed, “Islam is a religion of peace.” Curiously, no one on the other side of the debate bothered to quote the dozens of Qur’anic verses calling for violence against Infidels, instructing Muslims to “smite at their necks,” and so on and so bloody forth. Nor was there mention of the thousands of ahadith containing stories about Mohammed’s military campaigns – he took part in eighty, of them, with twenty of them involving his participation in battles. Mehdi Hasan knows all about those Qur’anic verses, and the stories about Muhammad in the authoritative collections of ahadith of Bukhari and Muslim. But Mehdi Hasan still wants us to believe that Islam is a “religion of peace.”
Mohammed didn’t just engage in violence against collective enemies – Arab pagans and Jews — but also visited violence on those individuals who mocked him. He called for his followers to “rid him” of three of those mockers – the poet Asma bint Marwan, the 120-year old [!] Jewish poet Afu ‘Afak, and another Jewish poet, Ka’b bin al-Ashraf — and those followers obliged, murdering all three, one after the other. Mohammed famously said “I have been made victorious through terror.” But for Mehdi Hasan, Islam is a “religion of peace.”
Since 9/11, there have been more than 48,000 terror attacks by Muslims around the world. Most of those attacks have been carried out against non-Muslims, but some have pitted Muslims of different sects against each other. But for Mehdi Hasan, Islam is a “religion of peace.”
Many Muslim lands are convulsed now, as they have been in the past, in violence. Three civil wars, in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, continue, though they may be sputtering to a close. There are sectarian conflicts – putting Sunni against Shia – in Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. There were the fanatics of the Islamic State who fought against both non-Muslims, such as the helpless Yazidis, and against less fanatical Muslims, in both Syria and Iraq. Morocco is in a longstanding diplomatic war with Algeria that may become a shooting war, over Morocco’s attempt to crush the Polisario Movement and to annex the Western Sahara. Inside Algeria, the Muslim fanatics of the Islamic Salvation Front carried on for more than a decade a war against the government, resulting in tens of thousands of victims. Lebanon has endured civil war between Christians and Muslims, from 1975 to 1990, and now, a political war pits Hezbollah against the rest of the Lebanese polity — Sunnis, Christians, Druze, and even some anti-Hexbollah Shi’a. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is fighting the Islamic State, and Sunnis have renewed attacks on the Shi’a Hazara. In Pakistan, Sunni terror groups, such as Sipah-e-Sahaba, are dedicated to murdering Shi’a professionals and destroying their mosques and madrasas. But for Mehdi Hasan, Islam is a “religion of peace.”
Many Muslim states are “despotisms tempered by dynamite.” That is, political assassinations of leaders, and their enemies, are one way for regimes to be replaced. Consider just the following list of Muslim states, with their murdered leaders – and one opposition figure — provided in parentheses: Egypt (Anwar Sadat), Libya (Muammar Qaddafi), Algeria (Mohammed Boudiaf), Morocco (Mohamed Ben Barka), Jordan (King Abdullah I, Wasfi Tal), Saudi Arabia (King Feisal), Iraq (Prince Feisal, Nuri as-Said, Col. Qassim), Pakistan (Liaquat Ali Khan, General Zia ul-Haq, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto), Afghanistan (General Massoud). No group of non-Muslim states come close to this record of political violence. But for Mehdi Hassan, Islam is “a religion of peace.”
Getting his start as a journalist in England, after stints at television broadcasters LWT and BBC, Hasan then reported on politics, first for The New Statesman and then for The Huffington Post, before moving to the Al Jazeera English network, where he appeared as a presenter of several Al Jazeera English shows, the main one being Head to Head. On that show, he raised such topics favored by the left as police brutality, inequality, QAnon, and Trump’s Twitter activity. His guests included Noam Chomsky, Ilhan Omar, and Bernie Sanders, whose common denominator is extreme hostility to Israel. Since 2020, he has hosted, on NBC’s online service Peacock, The Mehdi Hasan Show. His guests have included Mark Ruffalo, who has accused Israel of “genocide,” Keith Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, Congressman Ro Khanna, who claimed that “Israelis are burning down Palestinian villages,” a charge for which he later apologized, and the singer John Legend, who was prompted by Hasan to make anti-Israel remarks on his show, after which Hasan praised him for it, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has called Israel an “apartheid state” that “cages Palestinian kids.” In other words, Mehdi Hasan has stacked his deck with anti-Israel voices. Perhaps he’d like to surprise us, and invite on Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Sarah Idan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That would be worth watching.
It was to be expected that Mehdi Hasan would be quick to defend Fatima Mohammed from charges of antisemitism, based on her rant at the CUNY Law School commencement. Here is a look at Hasan’s defense of Fatima Mohammed here:
Mehdi Hasan’s Deceitful Defense of an Antisemitic Screed
by David Litman, CAMERA, June 7, 2023:
No reasonable observer would ever accuse Mehdi Hasan of providing thoughtful, balanced, and insightful discussions on the newsworthy subjects of the day, especially when the subject has anything to do with Jews. On June 4th, that happened to be the antisemitic screed at the City University of New York School of Law’s commencement ceremony, in which the speaker, Fatima Mohammed, called on her audience to use their rage to “fight against…Zionism around the world” and railed against “investors.” The speech was widely criticized and condemned by Jewish groups, university officials, and political leaders.
Once again upholding his reputation, the MSNBC host rode to Mohammed’s defense. The result was nine minutes of Hasan and his guests enthusiastically embracing willful blindness, legal nonsense, and material omissions.
Let’s start with the legal nonsense. One of Hasan’s guests, Naz Ahmad, a staff attorney at CUNY Law’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project, objected to “calling [Mohammed’s] speech hate speech when it doesn’t meet the legal definition of it in any manner of words.” It’s a bizarre remark that perhaps reflects on the quality of legal education at CUNY Law, given that there is no “legal definition” of “hate speech” under U.S. law. Hasan, too, insisted Mohammed’s remarks “did not come close to” this mythical “legal definition” of hate speech.
Neither in American law, nor in public international law, is there to be found a legal definition of “hate speech.” Mehdi Hasan should have known that, and corrected his guest Naz Ahmad. Could it be that he and Naz Ahmad are privy to a definition of which the rest of us have never been apprised? Or did he leave the statement unremarked because he, Mehdi Hasan, believes there is a widely accepted definition?
Hasan also tried to cast the widespread condemnation of Mohammed’s speech as an attempt at “cancellation.” But criticism of speech is not contrary to free speech. Quite the opposite. Criticism of speech fits squarely within Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous admonition: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” If harsh criticism of another’s speech amounted to “cancellation,” then Hasan himself would have plenty of accounting to do for his own past remarks.
Free speech is fine, but free speech must not be immune from other, critical speech. Mohammed made her antisemitic and anti-Israel rant, without any interruption from those who objected to her. Only afterwards did her critics speak their piece. And that was not “a cancellation” of speech. No one tried to shout her down, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been doing with ever-increasing violence to pro-Israel speakers all over this country and in Europe. Fatima Mohammed was listened to quietly, and only afterwards were the deplorable charges made in her speech held up for both analysis, and criticism, of her “falsehoods and fallacies.”
Now let’s move on to the willful blindness. Far from being a victim, Mohammed herself has exemplified the type of authoritarianism that courts and free speech advocates have warned against. Just over a year ago, she demanded Zionist students and faculty (95% of American Jews are supportive of Israel, and 80% feel an attachment to Israel) be banned from CUNY. Given his expressed concern for free speech, surely Hasan would view such overt demands to silence and ban an entire category of people because of their expression of their religious, ethnic, and national identity to be a serious threat to free speech….
Mohammed demanded that all pro-Zionist professors be banned from the CUNY Law School, faculty, that ought to have reminded Mehdi Hasan that the last time such a proposal was acted on was in 1933, when the Nazis fired all Jewish professors from German universities.
Hasan points at the radical CUNY Jewish Law Student Association’s (JLSA) defense of Mohammed’s speech as proof her rhetoric wasn’t antisemitic. The members of JLSA are free to express their fringe beliefs, which are at odds with the vast majority of American Jews, but that doesn’t make their opinions any more reflective of the Jewish community than those of “Jews for Jesus.” Moreover, their “anti-Zionism” doesn’t diminish the meaning of Zionism to the rest of the Jewish community. Not all Jews observe the Jewish sabbath, but that doesn’t make the Jewish sabbath any less Jewish. Not all Jews are Zionists, but that doesn’t make Zionism any less Jewish.
After Mohammed’s speech, the far-left, anti-Israel CUNY Jewish Law Student Assocation (JLSA), with only a few dozen members, put out a statement defending Fatima Mohamed, claiming there was nothing antisemitic about her remarks on Commencement Day.
Those remarks included her charge that Israel was a “colonial settler state” now committing “genocide” of the Palestinians. Here’s the statement of solidarity issued by CUNY’s Jewish Law Students Association — a confederacy of dunces — with “our friend and classmate Fatima.” Quoting from her remarks that Israel continued “to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers,” the statement said that it was “disingenuous to characterize these factual descriptions as antisemitic, when they describe the conditions of Palestinian life. ” So according to the JLSA, Israel – that makes herculean efforts to minimize harm to civilians – is in fact “indiscriminately raining bullets and bombs on worshippers.” Apparently, all those warnings by telephoning, emailing, leafletting, and using the knock-on-the-roof technique to warn civilians away from targets soon to be attacked, mean nothing to the JLSA, or to Fatima Mohammed. Others will agree with British Colonel Richard Kemp, who has studied the IDF and its minimizing of civilian casualties, and has declared it to be “the most moral army in the world.”
The recent campaign in May, Operation Shield and Arrow, backs up that judgement. According to the Palestinians themselves, of the 33 Palestinians killed in five days of fighting, 22 were members of the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and of the 11 others who died, four – three children and one adult – were killed in Gaza by a PIJ missile that fell short, and a fifth Palestinian killed in Israel where he had been working. That means at most six Palestinian civilians were killed. We know that these civilians consisted of three women, and three children. Two of the women were wives of two of the three PIJ leaders who were targeted the first day, and the three children were the PIJ leaders’ progeny. With that minuscule number of civilian casualties, can it possibly be claimed that the IDF has been “raining bullets and bombs” on Palestinian civilians? If it had been, there would have been dozens, or even hundreds, of civilian casualties.
Why did Mohammed claim that these “bullets and bombs had been indiscriminately rained down on worshippers”? “Worshippers”? Is she referring to some non-existent attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque? Yes, we know how the Palestinian leaders like to whip up fellow Muslims into a frenzy, by claiming that “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” but if there is a “danger” to Al-Aqsa Mosque, it is not now, and never has been, coming from the Israelis. It is Palestinians themselves who, in bringing rocks, and bottles for Molotov cocktails, inside the Mosque, desecrate the site by turning it into a weapons warehouse, and a fort from which to throw those weapons at Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount. Mehdi Hasan had nothing to say about Mohammed’s claim about Israel “raining bombs and bullets on worshippers.” That must mean he finds nothing objectionable in such a crazed and foul remark. The only “worshippers” being harmed are the Jewish worshippers praying at the Western Wall who have rocks “rained down on them” by Arabs on the Temple Mount.
Mehdi Hasan, you’ve now got your very own show. You have quite a following. Don’t you think you have a responsibility to respond to the criticism posted just above, lest your unwonted silence be taken to mean that you don’t know how to reply convincingly?
We’ll wait right here for your answer.
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