Ep. 15: Mehdi Hasan on Islam in the West, the Future of Gaza, and the Muslim Vote in 2024
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- čas přidán 3. 06. 2024
- Mehdi Hasan is one of the most polarizing media figures today. When we polled the Roca audience about who we should invite onto our new show, Mehdi Hasan was one of the more requested names. If we polled the audience on who we shouldn't invite onto our new show, his name probably would've been near the top of the list as well.
He has achieved a loyal following among progressive and pro-Palestinian circles and has sparred frequently on Twitter with previous We The 66 guest, John Spencer. Hasan called Spencer a propagandist and the urban warfare expert responded," I'm heartbroken."
Mehdi has worked everywhere from Al Jazeera and The Intercept to MSNBC and the BBC. Late last year, MSNBC canceled his two shows at the network, resulting in his decision to leave MSNBC and start his own outlet, Zeteo News.
It's unclear why MSNBC canceled his shows, although many note that he was vocally anti-Israel post October 7th and hesitated to, among other things, call the Hamas combatants "terrorists" instead of merely "fighters." We should note, however, that he has condemned Hamas' acts on 10/7 as terrorist acts.
In this conversation, the RocaNews cofounders Max Frost and Max Towey asked Mehdi about his solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, multiculturalism in the UK, whether Islam is reconcilable with Western values, how the Muslim community will vote in 2024, what he thinks of Wokeness, how Israel can defeat Hamas, and much more.
If you have guest ideas or questions, please email us at wethe66@rocanews.com.
In the meantime, let us know what you think of this interview in the comments.
Mehdi is probably one of the smartest people I’ve listened to in my lifetime
he is
what an eloquent frontal guy
respect to him and we the 66
Thank you 🙏
I wish he would let the Maxes actually ask the questions before he gets riled up and rants about something related to the question, but not quite answering the question...
Thank you, Nicole. Maybe we need to be more aggressive with our question asking!
@@WeThe66 maybe so- though i imagine it would be different guest to guest. it would have been nice to hear his answer to the question asked. and there were a couple points where a Max pushed him on actually answering the question asked. (though he still have an almost-answer instead of an actual answer)
on the flip side, i kind of appreciate you guys letting him run his mouth. it showed his interest in having a conversation vs. rambling about what he's already made up his mind about.
either way i trust you guys to do what's been in each interview. and i'm still going to listen to every episode.
Awesome! I think he did a great job of not accepting the overly broad categorizations and straw men that so often are wheeled out by The Right and mainstream media as if they prove that all progressive beliefs and policies lead to discord, failure, and destitution and all "others" are monsters who are incompatible with integrated modern life. Some things I especially liked were how he handled the questions about multiculturalism in the UK, when he pushed back about the economic stuff soon later/how the Right shouldn't get to set the discourse on that kind of thing, and all the stuff about the double standards of cherry picking ugly stuff about brown people and Muslims and whatever other group is being vilified by conservative media while they pass on the ugly stuff that could also be cherry picked, sometimes no cherry picking needed, about white Christian America/the perceived "good guys" around the 38-minute mark.
I wish more people in the public eye were ready and capable of making some of the cases he made and pushing back against the poisoned narratives people are so ready to accept. Once he really got going in the later parts, he was Jon Stewart-esque in how quick he was with being able to provide well-considered, informed, and effective counterpoints to what could easily have tripped up a less intelligent speaker (because emotion-baiting xenophobic scapegoating is generally an easier sell than conveying the nuances of an issue and convincing us not to just blame a group we've been trained to dislike). I don't know if I agree with 100% of what he said early on in terms of strategy or even that every single point he made will stand up for people who are inclined to disagree, but in terms of the values he espoused and the information he shared/points he made, I think this was great. Thanks for doing it and bringing on someone smart and competent and not some paper-thin boob who would crumble when you asked challenging questions.
(btw, Fox/Murdoch stirring up an endless froth of anti-immigration fury, which drives it to be such a concern for people who live outside of areas receiving a lot of Latin American immigrants, is so true. My fiance's grandparents watch a steady stream of Fox and think EVERYTHING they don't like or that inconveniences them is because of illegal immigrants. We get stuck in slow traffic in Northeast Philadelphia - "do you think this is because of all that immigration?" These are not people who travel, their mental faculties are slipping, they only absorb news from one place, and it is so repulsively clear that they've been sold this hooey about immigrants being some nation-wide boogie man through a non-stop barrage of angry talking heads, whereas otherwise they wouldn't even think twice about it because it's not part of their experience)
thank you so much for listening!
This journalist is really emazing ! 😍
Don't we love the beautiful quotes from Nelson Mandela but what is South Africa now? Apartheid states of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon are different because? What is Islam other than an apartheid ideology?.
"We all know that there's this cohesive English national identity...".
Just because there is some English national identity doesn't mean there isn't and hasn't always been internal division. There is tribalism in every country that goes hand-in-hand with national identity, and England is no different. The same people who will crow about the superiority of the English versus other countries, will, on the same logic feel that the place they're from is better than any other and violence has always been part of it.
One example is football hooliganism. It was a huge problem in the 70s and 80s.
Peaky Blinders is based on a real gang of urban youths in Birmingham that operated for about 30 years from 1880, until they were ousted by another gang. That has always been the reality in England, and the rest of the UK.
The Glasgow smile got its name from cutting the edge of the mouth up to the ears with a blade. In Glasgow a lot of the violence was around immigration, that of Irish Catholics moving to Scotland for work, which set off the Protestants.
In the noughties Glasgow had about the same number of street gangs as London, and London is about 6 times bigger.
The only thing that changed with immigration is that the constitution of the gangs changed. The idea that if there were less immigrants there'd be less crime is ridiculous. As Mehdi says, without immigrants our health service would collapse, as would the economy. And in times of economic hardship gang crime goes up.
Muslims are individuals. Jews are individuals. People's actions define their character...not their race, religion or belief system. Yes, Hamas is a terrorist group and shoul be held accountable. Netanyahu's attack on Gaza resulted in the death of 35.000 Palestinian civilians. These folks did nothing wrong.
Wait till you find out who elected Hama$ into power...oh, & there are eyewitness accounts by those whom have escaped kidnapping that claim that the local populace took part in kidnapping, hiding, & lynching of hostages & weapon stores.
Probably the most biased and narrow minded deluded individual I’ve ever heard. He’s everything the main stream media loves while pretending to be open minded.
15:46 1948 is when Israel was created? Ok.
"On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel."