MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, Joe Rogan, and the Left's Cancel Culture Double Standard
Feb 06, 2022 1:28 PM ET
Everyone knows the double standard is in place. It is taken for granted so much that people barely remark upon it anymore. When someone who dissents from the Leftist agenda offends Leftist sensibilities, his or her career is ruined for good. Remember Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, and a host of others. Now the Left has Joe Rogan in its sights for daring to dissent from COVID orthodoxy and has suddenly discovered that years ago, he used a racial slur. Spotify has removed over a hundred of his podcasts, and the end is not in sight. But if someone who is reliably Leftist says something that offends the self-appointed guardians of acceptable opinion, the punishment is slight at best, as we have just seen with Whoopi Goldberg’s two-week suspension for Holocaust denial (which doesn’t really bother the hard Left, but they have to keep up some semblance of an attachment to truth and basic decency). And if the offending speaker is a member of a group with enough victimhood privilege, he or she won’t be punished at all, as the career of Mehdi Hasan indicates.
Mehdi Hasan is a hate-filled far-Left MSNBC host who espouses fashionable Big Lies such as the claim that “white supremacy is now a key ideology of the Republican Party” and “the far-right domestic terror threat is more dangerous than even Al Qaeda after 9/11.” During the Whoopi Goldberg controversy, remarks that Hasan made in 2009 resurfaced, leading many to question why Hasan’s star has consistently risen in the Leftist media, despite his manifest hatred and contempt for non-Muslims.
Hasan, a Shi’ite, said of the early Sunni caliph Yazid: “All of these ulama unanimously agree that at the very minimum if Yazid was not a Kaffir [unbeliever] — then at the very minimum he was a fasiq, a transgressor, a breaker of Islamic laws, a corrupt individual, a tyrant, a killer, a drunkard, a dog lover, a music lover, a homosexual, a pedophile, a sexual deviant, someone who slept with his own mother.”
Now, the Left has no problem with corrupt individuals such as Hunter and Joe Biden if they’re on the right side of the political divide. Tyrannical themselves, Leftists have no problem with tyrants, either. Killers? Depends on who is being killed. Drunkard? Dog lovers? Music lovers? Come on, man! Homosexuals, pedophiles, and sexual deviants? Are we talking about the staff of CNN now?
Anyway, Hasan then broadened his targets to include atheists: “In this respect the Koran describes the atheist as cattle. As cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.” The Qur’an does indeed say: “Already we have created many of the jinn and mankind for Gehenna, having hearts with which they do not understand, and having eyes with which they do not see, and having ears with which they do not hear. They are like cattle, no, they are worse. These are the neglectful.” (7:179)
Related: MSNBC Host: ‘White Supremacy Is Now a Key Ideology of the Republican Party’
It is no surprise that Mehdi Hasan, a pious, believing Muslim, would repeat the Qur’an’s distaste and disdain for non-Muslims. It isn’t even a surprise that the Huffington Post and MSNBC would have no problem with his statements, because both are much more concerned about “Islamophobia” than they are about jihad violence, Sharia oppression of women, or the dehumanization of non-Muslims in Islamic texts and teachings. MSNBC was avid to showcase a Muslim host in order to demonstrate that they weren’t “Islamophobic,” and Hasan, a fast-talking, glib propagandist, fit the bill. Anyone who raised any objection to his hiring based on his statements about homosexuals, atheists, and unbelievers in general could himself be accused of “Islamophobia,” but that would take care of any problem.
Meanwhile, Hasan’s colleagues and friends have pursued any and all critics of jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression with undying fury, persecuting and harassing even their relatives and friends in their totalitarian quest to crush and destroy all dissent. If Mehdi Hasan had been a non-Muslim who said about Muslims what he said about non-Muslims, he would be but a dim memory as a public figure today, and if he ever were mentioned, would be reviled as a “racist” and an “Islamophobe.” But as it is, he remains a rising star.
The double standard is obvious because the Left isn’t really interested in policing the public discourse and cleansing it of “hate,” no matter what they say about Joe Rogan right now. Leftists’ actual agenda is to demonize and intimidate their opponents into silence and rule any dissent from their agenda beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. That’s why Mehdi Hasan has a show on MSNBC today and was never in danger of any professional difficulty because of his 2009 remarks. He is useful as a pit bull of defamation and smears against dissidents, and so his career is unassailable. Mehdi Hasan is, in fact, the epitome of the corruption of the American public square today.
MSNBC Host: ‘White Supremacy Is Now a Key Ideology of the Republican Party’
Sep 23, 2021 11:45 AM ET
If it’s absurd and incendiary, it must be MSNBC: The far-Left propaganda network’s Mehdi Hasan claimed Friday that the Republican Party is now all in on pushing white supremacist. Deriding Republicans’ opposition to “critical race theory” and warnings about the “great replacement theory,” Hasan declared: “It’s white nationalist propaganda,” now central to the Republican message. It was yet another manifestation of stupid and inciteful paranoia on MSNBC, but with a special edge: Remember, the Biden administration has been insisting that “white supremacists” constitute the nation’s foremost terror threat. Read against that backdrop, the chilling import of Hasan’s hysteria becomes clear.
Hasan ranted: “It’s the kind of thing that led to Hispanics being gunned down in El Paso. It led to Jews being massacred in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It used to be backed by Trump alone. Now it’s [Rep.] Elise Stefanik, who is supposed to be a moderate Republican. In 2016, she didn’t show up to the RNC because she objected to Trump. Now she’s pushing this nonsense.”
“It tells you, sadly, white supremacy is now a key ideology of the Republican Party,” he added. “It’s not white nationalist-adjacent. It’s part and parcel of the party’s views.”
“There are no moderate Republicans left,” said Hasan. “When it came to voting rights, Liz Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger voted against voting rights. Where are the Republicans, where the entire party is heading into the arms of neo-Nazis?”
On August 3, Old Joe Biden’s ghostwriter wrote this in his name in USA Today about the psychopath who murdered 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso:
[He] thought that his hatred of immigrants could prove more powerful than the culture and vibrancy of the people of this community. He was wrong. Yet America’s intelligence community has confirmed what the people of El Paso know all too well: the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland in recent years has been domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy. We cannot ignore it. We must confront the spread of hate-fueled violence in every form.
In a similar vein, Nancy Pelosi in June not only repeated the common and yet completely unsubstantiated claim that the Capitol incident constituted an “insurrection,” but claimed that it was rooted in “white supremacy,” as well as in “the anti-Semitism, the Islamophobia.” That was just after the Pentagon announced that it was going to start combating the “lethal threat” of white supremacy among American military personnel. Attorney General Merrick Garland likewise claimed in May that white supremacists posed “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.”
And now, after the president of the United States, the speaker of the House, the attorney general, and the Defense department have all gone on record saying that “white supremacists” constitute the biggest terror threat that the nation faces today, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan claims that “white supremacy is now a key ideology of the Republican Party.” The upshot of all this is clear: Hasan is attempting to lay the groundwork for nothing less than the criminalization of the Republican Party on the basis of the contention that it is fueling terrorism in the United States. This would, of course, make America a one-party state with even less of a political choice than the Republicans offer today, and that would likely be fine with a Leftist authoritarian such as Hasan, who long ago made clear his opposition to the freedom of speech.
Related: Pelosi: ‘Root Causes’ of Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Were ‘White Supremacy, Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia’
Still, Mehdi Hasan is just a crazy MSNBC host, right? That’s certainly true. And cooler heads surely prevail in the Biden administration and its Justice department, right? We can hope. But Hasan is not alone. Robert Grenier, who served as the CIA station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and later as director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, declared in February in a discussion about the January 6 “insurrection”: “You know, even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9/11, there really weren’t that many members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. And the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish.”
What is the “supportive environment” for the January 6 “insurrectionists”? Why, those who support Trump, believe in election integrity, and oppose the Biden administration’s far-Left agenda. In other words, that “supportive environment” is made up of millions of ordinary Americans who don’t like the direction the country is going in today. They’re the people Mehdi Hasan had in mind when he claimed that the Republican Party was full of “white supremacists.” And they’re the ones these Leftist authoritarians will be going after.
Jan 31, 2022 9:52 PM EST
MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: non-Muslims and atheists are 'cattle,' compares gays to incestuous pedophiles
MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan is under fire for recordings in which he compared gays to pedophiles and referred to non-Muslims as animals and cattle.
MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan is under fire for recordings in which he compared gays to pedophiles and referred to non-Muslims as animals and cattle.
In one of the recordings, which resurfaced on social media after it was posted by conservative commentator and Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, the host of "The Mehdi Hasan Show" on MSNBC compared non-Muslims and atheists to “cattle” and included “homosexuals” in a long list of abhorrent behaviors and and categories that he claims are transgressive of Islam including pedophilia and bestiality. He referred to non-Muslims as “kaffir,” or infidel.
“All of these ulama unanimously agree that at the very minimum if Yazid was not a Kaffir — then at the very minimum he was a fasiq, a transgressor, a breaker of Islamic laws, a corrupt individual, a tyrant, a killer a drunkard, a dog lover, a music lover, a homosexual, a pedophile, a sexual deviant, someone who slept with his own mother,” Hasan said in the sermon.
“In this respect the Koran describes the atheist as cattle. As cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world,” he also said.
WATCH:
A full archive of Hasan’s remarks was saved on Archive.org.
Hasan, who has previously addressed the remarks on Twitter, has not seen any consequences to his career as a result of his opinions, when they previously surfaced. Hasan, who worked at Al Jazeera at the time, also worked for The Intercept, which said it stood by the columnist and described his decision to speak up as “showing regret and contrition,” per The Wrap in 2019.
Despite having previously addressed his statements, Hasan has continued to denigrate and dehumanize his political opponents, the Republicans, as “domestic terrorists” and the supporters of terrorism.
NBC’s Mehdi Hasan: ‘Far-Right Domestic Terror Threat More Dangerous Than Al Qaeda After 9/11’
By Robert Spencer
Mehdi Hasan of NBC on Saturday provided a good example of the Left’s propaganda offensive to portray all support of Trump and all dissent from its agenda as dangerous terrorism that must be silenced and even criminalized. On the Mehdi Hasan Show and then on a Twitter thread, Hasan counted down five reasons for claiming that “the far-right domestic terror threat is more dangerous than even Al Qaeda after 9/11.” They were:
5. “Al Qaeda didn’t have cable news channels endorsing its world view.”
4. “Al Qaeda didn’t have the president of the United States or his daughter inciting them, or praising them during the attacks as ‘special people’ and ‘American Patriots.’”
3. “Al Qaeda wasn’t umbilically connected to the U.S. conservative moment and the GOP; didn’t have sympathizers in the House GOP caucus who spoke at its rallies and offered cover for them.”
2. “Al Qaeda hadn’t successfully infiltrated U.S. law enforcement and even the military in the run-up to 9/11. None of the 19 hijackers were off-duty cops or veterans.”
Hasan concluded: “And the number 1 reason why Al Qaeda was not as much a danger as these #MAGAterrorists are is because… Al Qaeda wasn’t white. We take the threat from brown men with big beards much more seriously than the threat from white guys. Hence the Capitol attack.”
This all sounds quite disquieting, but as is so often the case with Hasan and NBC in general, none of it is true.
5. Al Jazeera aired al-Qaeda materialand ran interference for it. Hasan’s exercise in moral equivalence also assumes that Trump incited and endorsed the storming of the Capitol on January 6, and that the entry into the Capitol was terrorism, and therefore when OANN or Newsmax reported favorably on Trump, they were endorsing terrorism. This is a whole string of false premises. Trump didn’t incite the attack: he never called upon people to enter the Capitol or disrupt the electoral vote count. To claim that he did so by means of “dog whistles” or some such is to claim that his intent beyond his actual words can be discerned in an objective manner. Once you grant that, you’ve opened the door for anyone in power to claim that someone criticizing them really means to incite violence, and thus must be silenced. The same thing goes for OANN and Newsmax: they never called for violence. Al-Qaeda calls for violence all the time. To equate the two means that any unpopular speech can be criminalized. Even Mehdi Hasan could find himself on the wrong end of that idea someday.
There is more. Read the rest here.