Since 2020, Hasan, who The Intercept and Al Jazeera English previously employed, has been hosting the “Mehdi Hasan Show.” He has developed a devoted fan base as an honest, direct host and interviewer. Videos of him questioning or arguing public figures—typically those on the right—have gone viral regularly, and his persuasive skills have been praised by viewers.
Hasan is among the few news anchors on a significant network who have voiced opposition to Israel’s harshness. Mehdi Hasan got a Sunday show on MSNBC thanks to his tough interviewing approach. That is until he began to discuss Palestine.
In a media environment that is otherwise unrelentingly jingoistic, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian, Hasan has been outspoken in his condemnation of Israel’s military and its apartheid against Palestinians, as well as of US wars in the Middle East, both recently and in the past.
Hasan has been drawing attention to the appalling conditions that Palestinians endure in Gaza since the start of Israel’s current genocide in October. He has also questioned Israeli officials about their use of propaganda lies, criticized the Israeli military strategy for its potential to incite more violence against Israelis from Hamas forces, and even made hints about the accuracy of the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” in describing Israel’s decades-long oppression of Palestinians and ongoing massacre in Gaza, which corporate media outlets have strayed far from in other reporting.
“You acknowledge that you’ve killed children, right?” In a very insightful interview earlier this month, Hasan questioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisor Mark Regev.
“No, I don’t,” replied Regev. “To begin with, you have no idea how those people passed away.”
Following Hamas’s attack in October, MSNBC also momentarily removed Hasan’s show from the air while temporarily removing two of its other Muslim anchors, Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi. Critics accused MSNBC executives of being Islamophobic as a result.
Left-wing pundits have expressed their indignation over Hasan’s show’s purported cancellation, citing his dual roles as a distinctive on-screen personality and a critical voice for the left and Gaza in the corporate media.
Noura Erakat, an attorney for human rights, wrote to MSNBC, “Make this make sense.” “Mehdir Hasan’s program is more needed than ever and has felt like an oasis on air.” His course on journalistic technique with Mark Regev lasted a whole semester. He ought to be intensified rather than silenced.
Mehdi Hasan prefers a cunning opponent, to be honest. “Interviewing village idiots is not enjoyable,” he remarks, using Marjorie Taylor Greene as one example. With the arrogance of a seasoned prizefighter, he relates some of his best interviews from his three years as the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC and Peacock. These include the short-lived Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy, Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw, and Elon Musk’s recently hired mouthpiece, Matt Taibbi.
Many of them started as disputes on Twitter. Hasan would always try to bait them into saying something along the lines of “Why don’t you invite me on your show, then?” which is the cable news equivalent of “Catch me outside.” They would trade jabs, hyperlinks, and quote-tweets. There was a braggadocio reminiscent of a playground, a political science bachelor’s crotch grab. Indeed, most of them were men. Fanboys may cluster around someone like Taibbi and sneer, “Nah, dude, he’s scared of you.” Once his subject was seated and the earphone was hooked in, the public pantsing could begin. Of all, this was exactly what Hasan wanted all along — a worthy rival and an audience.
“Other people have, you know, horse riding or basketball,” he says. “I argue in interviews. This is what gets me going. Imagine an action movie with a debate with Jason Statham. That’s like heaven for me.” The one he’s telling me about now, with Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defined the end of his MSNBC tenure. “The Israeli government is very good at putting out a spokesperson. Regev is one of the smoothest operators. Probably one of their best media performers. And that was, for me,” Hasan says, clapping and rubbing his hands together, “a challenge.”
Hasan had spent the previous fifteen years studying Regev’s career. Since the October 7 Hamas attack, Regev had made 13 appearances on MSNBC and NBC’s Meet the Press alone, until their discussion on his Peacock show on November 16. He meticulously prepared the rhetorical framework for Israel’s siege of Gaza, which included the attack on the hospital in Al-Shifa, which is now reduced to rubble. During his appearances, Regev reiterated Hamas’ claims of “beheading babies” and “using human shields,” saying that the Israeli force will be “surgical” and cause “minimum harm to civilians.” When he was on, anchors like Kristen Welker, Andrea Mitchell, and José Díaz-Balart would pose serious yet lighthearted questions to him. “How precisely do you grasp what’s taking place there?”
When Hasan mentioned that the siege had killed an estimated 11,000 Palestinians, citing figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, Hasan knew he had Regev beat. Hasan was interrupted by Regev, who yelled, “That Hamas controls! That is something you must say! “I don’t have to say what you ask me to say,” Hasan retorted. He was ready for this, though, so he pulled up a visual on the screen that showed how similar the Palestinian death toll from the previous two major battles, in 2009 and 2014, was according to Israel and the Gaza Health Ministry. They had the following conversation after Hasan mentioned the pictures of Palestinian children being dragged from the wreckage that was at the time going viral on the internet:
Hasan continued asking questions about the following: would Israel bomb an Israeli school if Hamas had taken control of it? “We wouldn’t allow them to take over a school in the first place,” Hasan said, referring to the propaganda tweets from Israeli leadership that included a video of an Israeli soldier claiming that the names of Hamas terrorists were written on an Arabic calendar. “Have you made a professional mistake, ever?” Hasan also questioned the genocidal language used by the Israeli administration, “I know my Jewish history.”
The exchange offered a moment of clarity for those expecting an Israeli official to answer for his actions. When Hasan tweeted the interview to his millions of followers, it became viral, even though it was broadcast on Peacock, an NBC streaming service that not many people use. His show was discontinued by MSNBC two weeks later.
prejudice and the silence of Muslim voices.” Omar is lying as usual: The hatred that is worryingly prevalent right now is anti-Semitism, not anti-Muslim. Whatever. In her attempt to turn Hasan into a poster child for Islamophobia, she got a lot of assistance. Noura Erakat said that Hasan’s program “has felt like an oasis on air and more needed than ever.”
an activist who is Palestinian-American, wrote on X. “He ought to be emphasized rather than silenced.” In case you are not aware of Erakat’s opinions, she stated that “Palestinians will not attack Jews because they are Jewish” but rather “because they are their military occupiers and oppressors” in 2022 during a session organized by the anti-Israel organization Nonviolence International. During a different panel discussion at the University of Illinois, she declared that “anti-Semitism and Nazism are bedfellows of Zionism.”
Similarly, an IfNotNow representative called Hasan “a vital voice holding those in power to account, providing a space for those questioning unconditional U.S. support for Israel” and saw the cancellation “as part of the sharp rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate.” Representative Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Squad who was recently censured by the House for her anti-Semitism, is IfNotNow’s main congressional supporter. Former head of the morally reprehensible Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, called the cancelation of the show “outrageous” and speculated that Hasan was let go because he was “an outspoken critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.”
Hasan had plagiarized whole lines from a US News & World Report piece regarding spanking, without giving credit, according to Intercept.
Hasan’s brand is called Hubris. “Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump’s lies,” he wrote on Twitter after sharing a video of himself interviewing a Trump campaign staffer while he was an Al Jazeera employee. Considering his limited abilities, maybe he ought to have dedicated more time to studying the art of respectful argumentation. He once admitted to being “afraid” that MSNBC would find him “too iconoclastic, too edgy.”
Even while he was a hero to himself, it turns out that he was just too predictable, biased, and boring to his viewers—and just too horrible in the extent to which he crossed the line into anti-Semitism. In a book review, the New York Times stated that the author “loves to lay a booby trap, just like Rambo.” “Boom!” he exclaims, continuing to talk about how rewarding it is to see his opponent’s dejected expression once the trap has been set, providing that “showstopper moment.”
Celebrated journalist Mehdi Hasan joins us to talk about how the Israeli war on Gaza has been covered by American media and how the US is inadvertently aiding and abetting a massacre. According to Hasan, American media is largely pro-Israel and does a poor job of telling viewers the whole story. “One of the biggest issues with our coverage of this conflict is the absence of Palestinian voices on American television and in American print media,” he argues.
After his weekly news program on MSNBC and Peacock ended earlier this year, Hasan founded a new media venture called Zeteo. Hasan’s harsh questions of Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev and other bits from his interviews became internet sensations regularly. However, in November, the cable network announced that Hasan’s show would be canceled. The decision caused a great deal of indignation, with detractors accusing MSNBC of effectively silencing one of the most well-known Muslim voices in American media.
Human rights organizations caution that a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza would result in a slaughter, yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has persisted in threatening such an action. Although President Biden has stated that he has a “red line” when it comes to this kind of escalation, Netanyahu has promised to continue.
Hasan queries, “Where is the outcry here in the West?” regarding accusations of war crimes committed by Israel, such as the assassination of more than 100 journalists in Gaza during the previous five months and the blockage of humanitarian aid from the area. “It’s a stain on America’s conscience and [Biden’s] record.”
A person with knowledge of the matter told The Post, “I think they thought (Hasan’s) point of view was a little too out of the mainstream if you know what I mean.”
