Mehdi Hasan or: How to pose as an adversarial journalist while laundering genocide

A lesson in propaganda peddling from Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo.

Let’s start with a pop quiz.

Q1: Which supposed progressive journalist wrote a New York Times column in 2015 under the title “Why I Miss George W. Bush,” reminiscing about the presidency of the war criminal who decimated Afghanistan and Iraq, and finished the column with a kick in the teeth: “I never thought I’d say it, but now I long for the Republican Party of George W. Bush.”?

1. Dana Bash

2. Chris Hayes

3. Mehdi Hasan

Q2: This supposed anti-establishment journalist wrote the 2023 book Win Every Argument. At one of the launch events for book, he bantered with the Democratic party insider Jen Psaki — who writes in a blurb for his book: “[Redacted] was one of the toughest interviews I did in the White House.” Identify the journalist.

1. Mehdi Hasan

2. Rachel Maddow

3. Wolf Blitzer

Q3: Which supposedly fact-based journalist did pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist scholar and author Norman Finkelstein — who has been one of the leading voices in debunking Israeli lies and shedding light on the Zionist state’s egregious behaviour towards the Palestinians — once label as a “sack of shit” and a “sewer rat” after the journalist cast aspersions on Matt Taibbi’s important Twitter Files reporting, falsely accusing him of erroneous reporting for getting one acronym wrong?

1. Aaron Rupar

2. Mehdi Hasan

3. Jim Acosta

Q4: Which supposedly Labour-supporting journalist once smeared Jeremy Corbyn in a Haaretz column with the following egregious line: “Does he suffer from an ‘unconscious bias’ on the left that doesn’t take allegations of anti-Semitism as seriously as it takes allegations of, say, Islamophobia? Probably.”?

1. Seymour Hersh

2. Mehdi Hasan

3. Ali Velshi

Q5: Which supposedly leftist journalist once begged the rabidly right-wing English tabloid Daily Mail for a chance to work for them so that he could “write pieces for the Mail critical of Labour and the left, from ‘inside’ Labour and the left (as the senior political editor at the New Statesman)”?

1. Sabrina Siddiqui

2. Owen Jones

3. Mehdi Hasan

Q6: Which supposedly independent journalist laundered The New York Times propaganda piece titled “Screams Without Words” about widely-debunked fake stories of rape by Palestinian resistance fighters on October 7 by tweeting the following: “Horrific testimony from eyewitnesses, as well as photographic evidence seen by Times reporters. Hard to read.”

1. Judd Legum

2. Mehdi Hasan

3. Sabrina Siddiqui

Q7: About which supposedly adversarial journalist did Ali Abunimah — the founder of The Electronic Intifada (the portal at the forefront of debunking Zionist lies about October 7 and publishing writers from Gaza in the middle of the genocide) — once tweeted the following: “Despite his performative adversarialism, this *snake emoji* always lends his brown Muslim ‘pro-Palestinian’ pseudo-credibility to the oppressors as a power-friendly ‘moderate’ gate-keeper. He recently unblocked me but suspect I’ll get blocked again now. Never trust”

1. Sabrina Siddiqui

2. Mehdi Hasan

3. Ayman Mohyeldin

Answer time…

If you answered Mehdi Hasan to each of these questions, congratulations, you scored 7/7. Here is the answer sheet: Answer 1, Answer 2, Answer 3, Answer 4, Answer 5, Answer 6, Answer 7.

Ali Abunimah is what Mehdi Hasan pretends to be.

Indeed, for all his adversarial posturing, Mehdi is nothing but an establishment tool who, in his own words, sabotages left from the “inside” for money. I have known about his fraudulent journalism for years and was meaning to write this article for a long time, but felt that it wasn’t exactly suited to my newsletter, but his two recent pieces changed that view.

He recently wrote a column for the British propaganda rag, The Guardian, with a headline that doesn’t beat around the bush: “Why Kamala Harris should pick Tim Walz as her running mate.”

The second article is in his very own rag, Zeteo. In a piece titled “Harris Did the Right Thing: She Picked Walz and Rejected Shapiro,” Mehdi launders Tim Walz as some sort of a progressive VP pick by the pro-genocide Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

In his propaganda piece, Mehdi adds a qualifier before vouching for Walz: “Progressives should be under no illusion: Walz is no friend of the Palestinians.” Then gets straight into the task of corralling his progressive readers into the Harris-Walz pen: “But he doesn’t have a history of saying racist things about them either. He is not a part of the anti-war movement, but he doesn’t smear them as far-right extremists.”

That’s it. Not being racist and not smearing conscientious protestors are all the qualifications Mehdi needs to support the pro-genocide Zionist Walz, whom he gushingly tells his readers is “America’s Fun Uncle.”

Sam Husseini recently published an article, arguing that the Democrats put forth the former IDF volunteer and the more rabidly Zionist Jew Josh Shapiro to gauge the voter sentiment before presenting to them the slightly more palatable Walz.

Husseini’s piece goes on to cite four articles that demonstrate Walz is AIPAC-funded, Israel-shilling, protest-slamming Zionist:

Jewish Insider reports: “Walz also received AIPAC’s endorsement during his House tenure, speaking at the pro-Israel group’s 2010 conference. ‘Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region, with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties, surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood,’ he said in his address that year.”

Jewish Telegraph Agency reports more recently: “He also expressed support for Zionism and said those who do not recognize Israel are antisemitic this June at an event held by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.”

Al-Monitor reports: “The governor traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2009 and met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. … ‘When Jewish students are telling us they feel unsafe, we need to believe them and I do believe them,’ he said.”

MPR News from February reported: “14 protestors calling on Walz to divest from Israel cited for trespassing at his residence.”

But Mehdi doesn’t see any of this. Perhaps it’s because he has been, in his own words, “Walz-pilled.”

That’s just the VP pick. We haven’t even gotten into the abhorrent Harris, who hasn’t said a word about stopping the genocide or advocating for an end to the shipment of American munitions which are being used to incinerate besieged Palestinians in their ramshackle tents.

During Netanyahu’s visit, Harris made a show of not attending his deceitful Congress address but “reiterated her longstanding and unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel and the people of Israel” in a closed-door meeting with the war criminal Israeli Prime Minister.

She went one step further on Wednesday. During a campaign speech when anti-genocide protesters repeatedly shouted, “Kamala, Kamala you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide,” she halted her speech and shot back with the remarkably inane line:

“You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win then say that. Otherwise I’m speaking.”

Her risible statement and subsequent posturing sent her supporters in a rapture.

One wonders if Mehdi had a similar experience watching his favoured candidate berate anti-genocide protesters.

A day after Harris’s tone-deaf performance it was reported that her campaign made it clear that it didn’t intend to stop sending arms to the Israelis in facilitation of their genocide of the Palestinians. “Harris’s campaign issues a statement indicating that she won’t be doing so,” The Times of Israel reported.

Mehdi wants his readers to vote for Harris and “America’s Fun Uncle.” It’s on brand for him. I despise cancel culture and hate purity tests, but it is hard to look past Mehdi’s history of sabotaging conscientious causes with his grifting. In this particular case, he has no qualms in preparing his readers to vote for the butchers of Gaza. He is effectively asking to reward the Democrats with another term despite their genocide! It doesn’t get any worse than this.

The legendary Malcolm X used to warn his people against falling prey to white liberals, for, he reasoned, they were a bigger danger to their cause than the white conservatives, who had the virtue of not being hypocrites in their disdain of African Americans:

“The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the smiling fox.”

Mehdi brands himself as a progressive liberal — his brown face and Muslim background come handy in that fake posturing — which he is now using to corral his followers to do the bidding of the Democratic genocidaires who have wholeheartedly supported the ongoing butchery in Gaza and have explicitly stated that they have no desire to stop the shipment of munitions responsible for Gaza’s annihilation.

I don’t read Mehdi’s outlet, but I have seen him platform some Palestinian voices from inside Palestine who I am sure are doing factual reporting about their lived experiences.

A more cynical — and probably accurate — view of Mehdi’s platforming of exceptional Palestinian journalists like Younis Tirawi would be that he needs such reporters to give credibility to his outlet. The Palestinian journalists’ factual reporting act as cover for him to slip in his establishment shilling and the corralling of conscientious voters in favour of whichever genocide enthusiast the Democratic elites ask their base to get behind. Good propaganda works when it is subtly sneaked in. Mehdi is good at it, especially in a society with widespread media illiteracy.

I haven’t been able to read most of the reporting of the Palestinian journalists on Zeteo because they are usually behind a paywall. I would rather throw my money down a river, like Muhammad Ali threw his Olympic medal in the Ohio River, than willingly hand it to an immoral and unethical propagandist like Mehdi Hasan, who is laundering the enablers of the Israeli genocide that has killed nearly 200,000 Palestinians over the last ten months and is still continuing unabated.

The more people recognise shills like Mehdi for who they are, the better it will be for the causes that matter. At present, there is no bigger cause than stopping the genocide in Gaza and Mehdi’s fraudulence isn’t helping lessen the Palestinian suffering.

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