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Mehdi Hasan Warns Bigots Like the One Who Attacked Him Could Soon 'Be in Charge of US Foreign Policy'
If Donald Trump wins next week's election, the journalist said, violent racists "will be emboldened like never before."
Oct 31, 2024
Journalist Mehdi Hasan responded at length Wednesday to a bigoted attack he faced from a fellow CNN panelist earlier this week, warning that the kinds of people who would incite violence against a Palestinian rights advocate on live television could soon be in charge of U.S. foreign policy if Republican nominee Donald Trump wins the November 5 election.
Hasan, the founder of Zeteo, said he has never in 25 years of working in media "been so stunned" as he was when Ryan Girdusky—a right-wing commentator and Trump supporter—said that "I hope your beeper doesn't go off" after Hasan expressed support for Palestinian rights.
Girdusky's remark, which referenced a mid-September Israeli attack in Lebanon and Syria that killed dozens of people—including children—underscored "how bold these MAGA Republicans have become in their racism," Hasan said in his video response Wednesday.
While welcoming CNN's decision to ban Girdusky from the network, Hasan warned that such bigots "will be emboldened like never before" if Trump defeats Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in next week's election.
"They won't just be running their mouths on TV panels against public figures like me," said Hasan. "They'll be at your kids' school gate. They'll be at your grocery store. They'll be in your subway car proudly and shamelessly saying this stuff to you, too. They'll also be in charge of U.S. foreign policy, egging on Israel to do more beeper attacks, even more acts of terror, egging on Trump and [Republican vice presidential nominee JD] Vance to be more racist, more violent both at home and abroad."
Watch Hasan's full response:
"As shocked and stunned as I was, there was no way I was going to let him say that to me, unchallenged."
My response to the racism & incitement on Monday, to a CNN pro-Trump panelist telling me: “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off," because I said I supported Palestinian rights. pic.twitter.com/GJCAC1vAKd
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) October 30, 2024
Hasan called the November 5 contest between Trump and Harris "the most consequential election of our lifetimes" and said that "genocide is on the ballot," criticizing the Democratic vice president for refusing to distance herself from President Joe Biden's unwavering support for Israel's assault on Gaza.
"But also, fascism plus genocide is on the ballot," said Hasan, pointing to Trump's authoritarian ambitions and open support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump praised for "doing a good job" in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 43,000 people in just over a year—a majority of them women, children, and elderly.
"I'm in no mood to explain myself to the racists and bullies," Hasan said Wednesday. "But I will continue to speak out, I will continue to do the work, and so should you."
Author and activist Naomi Klein voiced agreement with Hasan's analysis of the dire state of U.S. politics and his warning that the situation could deteriorate further, writing on social media: "Some claim things cannot get worse. They absolutely can."
"Look to any country where the prisons are bursting with political prisoners. There is no shame in voting against even worse," Klein wrote. "Fascists triumph when we lose our capacity to think strategically."
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Study Exposes Double Standard for CNN and MSNBC Coverage of Gaza v. Ukraine
U.S. media, analysts said, "should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone."
Oct 15, 2024
As the death toll from the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip continued to climb on Monday, The Nationpublished a study revealing the "glaring double standard" for American corporate media coverage of that war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The analysis was conducted by Adam Johnson, who co-hosts the podcast Citations Needed and writes media criticism at The Column, and Othman Ali, a researcher and data analyst with an advanced degree from the University of Oxford.
The pair—who released their full dataset on GitHub—focused on the first 100 days of each conflict. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and Israel launched its war on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
Since the Russian invasion, media critics have highlighted "the racist and dehumanizing double standards of war reporting." Over the past year, such criticism has mounted, with arguments that Western media are "enabling" genocide in Gaza.
In March, protesters frustrated with the U.S. "newspaper of record" even gathered in Manhattan and chanted, "New York Times you can't hide, we charge you with genocide." Watchdogs like Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting and Media Matters for America have published various critiques, with the latter often focusing on right-wing sources.
"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign."
Johnson and Ali focused on commentary, editorial priorities, and reporting by CNN and MSNBC, explaining that "the third major cable network, Fox News, was not included in our analysis because the focus of our study is in the formation of liberal and Democratic Party-aligned support for Israel's war on Gaza."
They found that on the two networks, Palestinians in Gaza received "far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia's invasion."
"The point of this analysis is not that U.S. media should reduce its coverage of the tragedies in Ukraine to achieve parity with Gaza, but that it should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone," the pair stressed.
"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign, backed by unending American military and political support, that is unprecedented in the 21st century," they added.
Johnson and Ali highlighted four key findings:
- Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering;
- On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as "brutal," "massacre," "slaughter," "barbaric," and "savage" were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians;
- CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia's invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel's bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former; and
- On CNN and MSNBC, the words "war crime" or "genocide" were mentioned over 17 times more in the context of Ukraine than they were in the context of Gaza.
They found that for each child death in Ukraine during the first 100 days, there was the equivalent of 16.1 mentions on air, while kids in Gaza received the equivalent of 0.36 mentions. For journalist deaths, it was 24 versus 2.5. The study also shows that the networks "covered Ukrainian civilian suffering almost twice as often as they covered that in Gaza," despite the latter having a death toll that was 500% greater.
In just the first 30 days of the Russian invasion, cable news anchors, guests, and reporters used emotive terms for Russians killing Ukrainians 661 times. In the first month of Israel's assault on Gaza, they used such language to describe the killing of Israelis 1,053 times and Palestinians 43 times. Additionally, people appearing on-air for both networks described Ukrainians as being subjected to genocide or war crimes 1,790 times compared to just 104 times for Palestinian victims.
"One common rejoinder to this double standard is that Israel doesn't intentionally kill civilians, whereas Hamas and Russia do," Johnson and Ali pointed out. "But this assertion is based entirely on unsubstantiated conventional wisdom and is belied by scores of data points."
In a note attached to the article, the researchers detailed that the United Nations "estimated that around 4,000 civilians had been killed 100 days into the Ukraine war. The broadly accepted death toll in Gaza for the first 100 days is over 24,000, but this is a figure that doesn't distinguish between civilians and noncivilians. So, in the interest of being conservative, we are using the civilian death toll of 20,000—though this number, as several researchers have explained, is almost certainly a massive undercount because it only includes confirmed deaths, not those unidentified, under rubble, or dying from secondary causes such as preventable illness, starvation, etc."
More than 1,100 people were killed in Hamas' attack on Israel last October, and militants took over 240 others hostages. Some captives have been released, some have been killed—including by the
Israeli assault—and some are still believed to be alive.
As of Tuesday, Gaza officials put the confirmed death toll for Palestinians in the Hamas-governed enclave at 42,344, with another 99,013 wounded. In recent days, Israel has bombed a hospital complex and refugee camps. The vast majority of the strip's 2.3 million residents have been displaced, often several times over the past year.
The U.S. government has long supplied Israel with weapons and diplomatic backing and has ramped up such support since last October, despite global criticism. Multiple news outlets revealed Tuesday that in a Sunday letter, the Biden administration finally threatened to cut off U.S. arms unless Israel takes certain action to improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
In response to the letter, Johnson
said on social media: "1) Israel can keep bombing all it wants 2) Criteria for 'improve' is vague and like 'invasion of Rafah' they'll just post facto change the definition."
"BUT what's noteworthy is the tacit admission the U.S. can condition military aid," Johnson added, "something I was told was pointless five [minutes] ago."
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Gaza Doctor Corrects CNN Anchor: 'This Is Not a Humanitarian Crisis... This Is Genocide'
"History books will be written on this and countries will have to reckon—media agencies will have to reckon—with their major role in the genocide," said Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan.
Oct 11, 2024
Human rights advocates on Friday highlighted a rare instance in which a U.S. corporate media outlet allowed a pro-Palestinian voice to set the record straight about Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Earlier this week, CNN "News Central" aired a panel segment on the anniversary of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory war. Anchor Kate Bolduan noted that around 1,200 people were killed during the Hamas attack—although she did not say that at least some of them were slain by Israeli forces in "friendly fire" incidents and under the Hannibal Directive—and that 250 others were kidnapped.
Bolduan also acknowledged that nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and another 2 million displaced by Israeli forces, calling the situation in Gaza a "desperate humanitarian crisis."
"A humanitarian crisis is what you deal with when you have a hurricane, what you deal with when you have an earthquake."
The anchor asked panel participant Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan—an American pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip—for her thoughts on the matter.
"In all honesty, a humanitarian crisis is what you deal with when you have a hurricane, what you deal with when you have an earthquake," Haj-Hassan replied. "This is not a humanitarian crisis."
"Kate, and I'm going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear, this is genocide," the doctor stressed.
Haj-Hassan continued:
When 70% of the population that are killed are women and children, when the population is starved of food, of water, of medicine, when you have attacks, repeated attacks on all the hospitals, the clinics, the aid distribution sites, the humanitarian aid agencies that tried to help, more [United Nations] workers have been killed in Gaza than in U.N.'s history. When you have over 900 families that have been exterminated, that have been taken off of the civil registry, killed, when you have over 17,000 children that have lost one or both parents, when you have bakeries, aid distribution sites, churches, mosques, schools, and in the last three days—in the last 24 hours in fact—a hospital today that was bombed, as you just reported, the hospital where I personally was working, and I can tell you, they are working every second of every day to try and sustain life.
"And so it's really hard to hear it over and over and over again, framed in the way that it's being framed in the media, which, frankly, Kate, is very misleading," Haj-Hassan said. "It is very misleading. Three hundred and sixty-five days of this. Death tolls that are so far outdated we have... no idea how many people are killed."
"But I am... genuinely afraid about what we're going to find out when the dust settles. History books will be written on this," she added. "And countries will have to reckon—media agencies will have to reckon—with their major role in the genocide of an entire population and in the destruction of humanitarian law and rule of order."
Some observers noted the absence of voices like Haj-Hassan's in U.S. mainstream media coverage of Gaza, which is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and almost never airs the word "genocide"—even as Israel is on trial for the crime at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The New York Times, for example, ordered journalists covering the war in Gaza to eschew terms including "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and even "occupied territory," even though Israel has indisputably occupied Palestine for over half a century and the ICJ recently ruled that the Israeli occupation is a crime of apartheid that must end immediately.
"The media may be forgiven for missing a carefully hidden story. For missing some details," Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft executive vice president Trita Parsi said Friday on social media. "But when a genocide is there for everyone to see and you help conceal it, forgiveness is not in the cards."
Another social media user offered mild praise for Bolduan—who has been criticized by Israel supporters for previous interviews in which Palestine defenders accused Israel of genocide—writing that the anchor "didn't seem happy" to hear what Haj-Hassan was saying.
"Hard to say whether it was because the truth is so horrible or because CNN doesn't want to report that truth—but she did let her say it," the user said of Bolduan.
Allegations of Israeli genocide remain highly contentious—even taboo—in the United States, which provides the key Mideast ally with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover including multiple vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions that were overwhelmingly supported by other countries.
In the United States, Palestinians, Palestinian Americans, and human rights groups are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit a lawsuit they filed accusing President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin of complicity in the Gaza genocide.
In July, a three-judge panel of the federal court dismissed the lawsuit, in which the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California previously found that "the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law," but dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds.
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