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This is cross posted by Richard Millett
New Statesman Editor, and CiF commentator, Mehdi Hasan
Last Friday Luke Bozier, a Labour blogger, said of Mehdi Hasan, the embattled Senior Editor (politics) at the New Statesman magazine:
“Wouldn’t it be good if he just buggered off to Tehran.”
It was in response to Hasan’s ['Comment is Free'] article the previous day If you lived in Iran, wouldn’t you want the nuclear bomb? which some commentators have interpreted as a call by Hasan for Iran to develop a nuclear bomb.
Yesterday Hasan posted a response to the criticism of his article and made the following curious remark about Bozier:
Can you imagine the media reaction if a British Jew wrote a column about Israel which prompted the response of “bugger off to Tel Aviv”?
I can’t see the parallel myself. Hasan isn’t Iranian and neither does Bozier’s remark seem to be an attack on Hasan’s Muslim identity.
It might be in dispute as to whether Hasan’s article amounts to a call for an Iranian nuclear bomb, but what is not in dispute is his coming to the defence of the vile Iranian regime, describing it as “surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies” and he doubts whether Iran is looking to create a nuclear bomb when he gives credence to the regime’s rhetoric that its “goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs”.
And so Bozier’s comment is not so different from those by people who tell apologists for Hamas to move to Gaza if they love Hamas so much. It’s the same with telling Hasan to go to Tehran. It isn’t a racist slur.
And in reality, and Hasan must know this, the equivalent far-left racial slur against British Jews is for us to bugger off to Russia. I, myself, was once told to go back to Poland at an anti-Israel event in London.
So what a nice change it would be for British Jews to be told to “bugger off to Tel Aviv”.
Implicit in such a suggestion would at least be a recognition of the Jewish connection to Israel, a connection which both the Palestinian leadership and the far-left refuse to make.
But it wasn’t like that before 1948 when the common refrain of racists in the UK was for Jews to go back to Palestine. After 1948 it became politically inconvenient for the racists to suggest Jews go back to Israel, so Poland and Russia are now the new hot spots designated for us by the far-left, irrespective of the fact that Jews got slaughtered there in their millions by the Nazis.
And how ironic that Hasan now chooses to employ British Jews in his defence when he has previously shown us such disregard with his casual attitude to anti-Semitism.
In an echo of Ben White’s article in 2002 Is It Possible to Understand the Rise in Anti-Semitism? in which White wrote “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are” Hasan wrote in his article Does Israel “cause” anti-Semitism?:
“Nothing justifies anti-Semitism…But I do find it both tragic and ironic that the state of Israel…through its actions today…provokes such awful anti-Semitic attacks against diaspora Jews who have nothing to do with the actions of the IDF or the policies of Netanyahu, Olmert and Sharon.”
As The CST‘s Dave Rich wrote in the comment section of that post:
“The people who are primarily responsible for racist hate crimes are the racists who perpetrate them; the “cause” is their bigotry and hatred for a chosen ‘other’…You would not write an article lamenting that fact that Muslim immigration “caused” the recent arson attack on the Luton Islamic Centre…Don’t make excuses for racists, and don’t use racism as an excuse to score political points.”
And anyway, Hasan and President Ahmadinejad do have similar ideas which suggests that Hasan might actually feel at home in Tehran. For example, they both wish for Israel to be wiped off the map. In his article I’ve changed my mind about a two-state solution Hasan describes his own solution as being:
“a single, secular and binational state for Israelis and Palestinians. No longer ‘two states for two peoples’, but ‘one person, one vote’.”
And in mid-July 2009 he wrote of the Iranian regime’s Press TV that “not a single critic so far has claimed that his or her views were ever censored”.
However, two weeks earlier Press TV interviewed Hossein Mousavi in his prison cell in Iran asking him questions prepared by the Iranian regime with Mousavi reading his answers from a script also prepared by the regime. (OFCOM recently upheld the complaint of unfair treatment and unwarranted infringement of privacy in making the programme containing Mousavi’s interview.)
So, Mehdi, by all means hate Israel, excuse anti-Semitism and support the Iranian regime if you are that way inclined but please don’t try to use British Jews in your defence when it suits you politically.
And if anyone does tell me to “bugger off to Tel Aviv” I will be happy that, finally, they will have stopped trying to force me back to Poland.
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10 years have passed since the greatest terrorist atrocity in history. A decade is a long time. In a decade our kids look different, they pass from one stage of life to another.
In a decade, we become experienced in whatever we do professionally. We garner credibility and experience which grants us wisdom and we even may reconsider some our our past follies in light of the new experiences. We grow, we enlighten. The alternative is aging bitterly, succumbing to dogmatic entropy where self reflection is absent and the blame game is ever growing according to the new Democratic Party
The Guardian didn’t grow, didn’t evolve.
The Guardian re-asserted its defense of Islamic grievances, its dislike of any effort made by America to counter the terror and the ideology which produces the terror, Islamism.
As the anniversary approached they rolled out their worse offenders. Seumas Milne was back defending his post 911 essay which blamed the attacks on the West.
They also invited Inayat Bunglawala to contribute to an anniversary piece. This guy called Osama a “good Muslim” not long before the attacks and has been representing an organization which not only defended terrorists but also supplied the ideological indoctrination to British Muslims, the MCB. 
Mehdi Hasan was also staged once more, lecturing us about tolerance despite a dozen videos outing him as a hateful fanatic and bigot who calls non Muslims dogs and cattle.
Or George Galloway who is nothing more than the 21 Century version of Oswald Mosley, being the propaganda agent of a hostile regime, one, like the one Mosley promoted, planning another (or as they would say the first and only) final solution to the Jewish problem.
I stumbled upon a post in CIF by Edward Said which appeared on Sept 16th 2001. Edward Said is the guru of the so called progressive left when it comes to dealing with the affairs of the Middle East, Islam and the supposedly American / Western/ Zionist inspired clash of civilizations.
Said was a great influence on Barack Obama and he embodies the Guardian World View where Israel, its lobbies and American capitalism are the causes of terrorism emanating from an “oppressed” Muslim street which is a victim of imperialism, Zionism and American capitalism.
Obama removed references to terrorism and radical Islam from the 911 ceremonies.
Said wrote in 2001:
You’d think that ‘America’ was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people’s suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom’ whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) ‘Islam’ that takes new forms every day.
These paragraphs say it all. As if no other creative writer ever existed at the Guardian. Said is the prophet and the rest of the contributors must only repeat versions of his visions.
Most writings on this conflict are, in one way or another versions of this narrative. This is the Hadith the Guardinistas quote day after day. Like Pakistani children sitting on the floors of Madrassas, they chant these passages only changing the order by which lines follow each other.
America, arrogant, Zionism, lobbies, oil, Palestine, children of Iraq, children of Afghanistan (no mention of these children under Saddam and the Taliban), imperialism, colonialism, capitalism. The next day its Israel, America, imperialism, arrogant, Palestine, lobbies, Iraq, Afghanistan….you get the idea…
As if in a trance or in some Pavlovian experiment, these ideas and theories persist despite the world turning over to new chapters of history.
A decade has passed, yet no maturity, no self reflection, no remorse, no rethinking. The text and its dogma are sacred. Like the Koran which cannot be amended, re-interpreted as that would be sacrilege. The Guardian is like the Muslim street. Never would it re-assess its views or its mistakes or see things even in a slightly different light. It merely re-asserts its demands and view which blame everything on the civilization under attack by its co-religionists.
In this decade we saw more terror attacks. London, Madrid, Bali, Fort Hood, the attacks on Synagogues in Turkey, the attempts at more mayhem in the skies using liquid bombs and plots against the NY subway and the Frankfurt airport. We saw more “militants” in their videos calling for the world wide caliphate, sharia and the re-conquest of Spain and Palestine under the Ummah. Yet at the Guardian the attackers are us. We are the colonizers, we are the zionists and oppressors. No facts, no history will change that.
A religious dogma is defined as an unchangeable set of ideas transcending the tracks of time. They survive despite and not because of the changes in time. At the Guardian we are dealing with a religious dogma. A dogma which infused the Saidian version of history with the sour grapes hatred of capitalism in light of the fall of the communist block. The total rejection of the totalitarian imposed righteousness was the year 1989. The Guardian still didn’t acknowledge that. It still tries to depict the yearning for freedom by Eastern Europeans as a result of imperialist plots drawn up in the back rooms of MI5 or the CIA. In Islamism they found another righteous totalitarianism. Another totalitarianism which claims to fight for the oppressed. Though just like the USSR in its days, it is the most imperialist of ideologies around today. The Guardian is the place where atheists can become Islamists.
Just like during the Cold War when Anglo Saxons have proudly allied with the nastiest Russian Pan Slavic nationalism (Stalinism as others may know it) at the Guardian today we see Anglo Saxon Islamists. People who are not Muslims but subscribe to the ideological goals and myths of Islamism. Ignorant of the texts upon which their new allies founded their hateful vision, the Guardinistas fight on for their cause like the loyal little Communists under the pay of Moscow during the Cold War, attacking the institutions and ideas of liberty and freedom.
They merely see it through their own selfish prisms which have been formulated during the Cold War or during their spoiled middle class childhoods where disappointment in a selfish demand resulted in a nihilistic hatred of the one denying the demands.
“What I cannot have I will destroy” is the real motivation behind the “modern leftist”.
A decade has passed since 911. There are soldiers today in Iraq and Afghanistan who were children on that day. They played with toys, watched cartoons and wondered why their parents were glued to the TV for so many days following that evil morning. Today they are fighting the war which was launched by these attacks. They have grown, they have matured and they are aware of what we are facing.
Yet at the Guardian -
We saw more hate, more obfuscation and lies. Some blatantly repeated like Simon Jenkinswho claimed Palestinian solidarity with America on 911 despite decades of video evidence showing Palestinians handing out sweets and chanting in euphoria learning of the fall of the WTC. We see the same dogma not rejected or even questioned, but alive and well, ready to poison the intellectual space for another decade. In that decade kids born in 2001 will be adults. Those who lived through it will be even more wiser.
I fear that the Guardian staff will still be like those Pakistani children chanting on the floors of Madrassas repeating the same passages: America, Arrogant, Zionism, Lobbies, Capitalism, Imperialism, racism and Palestine…
H/T Omri
On Sept, 2nd I commented on Mehdi Hasan’s CiF pice, A State of Palestine would backfire on its own people, which opposed the upcoming Palestinian Declaration of Independence (UDI), not because it would be injurious to the peace process but because it would mean the de facto recognition of the Jewish state, and bring to an end the immutable (inheritable) grievance of the “nine million” Palestinian “refugees” in the “diaspora”.
Hasan’s commentary, which, quite predictably, vilified and demonized the Jewish state in a manner consistent with those who seek the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East, included this photo:
First, the characterization of the event as a “march” is grossly inaccurate.
The incident was one in a series of violent acts on May 15th, 2011 – a date known by anti-Israel activists as “Nakba Day” (which mourns Israel’s very existence) – which took place on the Lebanon and Syrian borders, as well as in East Jerusalem, Qalandia, Bethlehem, Beit Omar and Nebi Salah, and elsewhere, and which was believed to be an Iranian sponsored provocation.
The incident, which the photo illustrates, occurred at the Erez crossing in the Gaza Strip, where dozens of Gazan civilians breached a Hamas roadblock during the early afternoon hours on May 15, and attempted to damage the crossing (which also gives Palestinians humanitarian aid) and illegally cross the border into Israel.
The protester allegedly injured was a resident of Palestinian ruled Gaza, not the West Bank.
In other words, the man who’s the focus of the Guardian photo is not one of the “refugees” which Hasan’s piece focuses on but, rather, a citizen of an independent Hamas-run Palestinian state who was attempting to storm the border of a state which his country is essentially at war with.
Other than complimenting Hasan’s broader narrative, of Israeli villainy and immutable Palestinian victimhood, what possible relevance does the photo have with the commentary?
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The EUMC working definition of antisemitism is very explicit in its formulation that, taking into account the overall context, denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination is antisemitic. The so-called “one-state solution“, which posits a bi-national secular democracy in Israel and the disputed territories, is one manifestation of this and was being touted in an article yesterday by Mehdi Hasan.
As Alan Dershowitz in the past has stated:
The one-state solution proposal now being made by Palestinian lawyers and some anti-Israel academics is nothing more than a ploy. It is designed to destroy the Jewish state of Israel and to substitute another Islamic Arab state. Those who advocate the single state solution would never do so with regard to India, the former Yugoslavia, or other previously united states which have now been divided on ethnic or religious grounds.
There’s something rather ironically predictable about the Guardian choosing to end this particular year, in which Israel and Jews everywhere have been under unprecedented attack, with a rather pompous piece by Mehdi Hasan. This rising young star of the British media world has been in the spotlight rather often in recent months for reasons which can best be described as ‘interesting’ in the same manner that my children used to describe my mother’s culinary attempts.
For non-British readers, here’s a quick guide to Mehdi Hasan’s world. He was an editor at Channel 4 and commissioned various ‘Dispatches’ documentaries, including ‘It Shouldn’t Happen To A Muslim’ by Peter Oborne – best known to some of us for his recent programme exposing the non-existent ‘Jewish Lobby’. Then Hasan moved to The New Statesman, where he currently works as senior political editor and also blogs. Since taking up his new position he’s managed to ruffle quite a few feathers by suggesting that it’s acceptable to work for the Iranian regime mouthpiece Press TV, that it’s good to talk to the Taliban, and that Israel is to blame for rising antisemitism in Britain. Understandably, he has been taken to task for these and other claims. There was also a rather prolonged spat with Harry’s Place, which culminated in the publication of a video of Hasan speaking at an Islamic centre.
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Guardian’s Simon Tisdall fears Romney’s belligerence (& Israel’s obsessive fears) may push U.S. to war
January 16, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Comment is Free, Guardian, Brian Whitaker, Simon Tisdall, Mehdi Hasan, Delegitimization, Terrorism, anti-Zionism, Iran, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Mitt Romney | by Adam Levick | 9 comments
Simon Tisdall
His moral instincts are so refined, so sophisticated, and so unburdened by conventional thinking that he was able to see past the universal enmity towards Sudan’s tragically misunderstood leader, Omar al-Bashir, charged with genocide for acting with intent to destroy non-Arab ethnic groups in the Darfur region.
Al-Bashir’s unimaginably bloody campaign resulted in up to 400,000 dead and resulted in 2.5 million refugees.
Here’s the money quote from Simon Tisdall’s Dec. 27, 2010 apologia for Omar al-Bahsir.
That final sentence should be placed in a museum of intellectual thought as a perfect representation of the Guardian Left’s capacity to synthesize anti-Americanism, post-colonialism and a perverse understanding of anti-racism in order to defend the morally indefensible.
Such background should help partially contextualize Tisdall’s latest “analysis” of the foreign policy implications of the American elections, “You’ve been Romney-ed! Obama must beware of GOP foreign policy vortex“, Jan. 15.
Tisdall’s broad argument is that Obama should keep to his principles and not be pushed unwillingly into a regional war with Iran, as both the result of a political pressure (to be more hawkish and, thus, win re-election) from Mitt Romney’s increasingly confrontational and belligerent foreign policy positions regarding Iran – pressure partially caused by “Israel’s obsession ”with eliminating the Iranian threat.”
Tisdall blames Romney for his ”uncompromising hostility to the Tehran regime” – such as his support for an “increase [of] US military presence around Iran, stepped up covert warfare, support for Iranian opposition groups, and beefed up military co-operation with Israel” – which, he argues, would play right into Netanyahu’s hands.
Tisdall:
In this passage Tisdall demonstrates his moral divide: a militaristic Israel which fears the specter of a “peacemaking agenda”, and is irrationally obsessed with the Iranian threat, versus an Iran (“pondering war and peace”) which understandably views such American and Israeli belligerence as “provocative”.
Tisdall’s empathy for the legitimate concerns of the Mullahs in Tehran, and condemnation of Israeli measures meant to thwart the Iranian threat, represents pretty much conventional wisdom at the Guardian.
Such moral reasoning has included:
Of course, strangely missing from any of these essays and editorials warning about the dangers of provocative acts by Israel and the US is any mention that Iran’s military is not only already engaged in routine belligerence acts, but routinely foments terrorism around the globe, and engages in proxy wars as a component of their foreign policy aims of exporting their Islamist revolution.
Iran is widely recognized as the world’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism. Both directly and indirectly, Iran funds, trains and arms groups that share the regime’s stated goal of destroying Israel and the West, as well as overthrowing moderate Muslim regimes. Groups who have received the Islamic Republic’s largess include Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
Iran also provides support to Islamist insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have inflicted casualties on American, British, Australian and other multinational forces.
In fact, Iran is attempting to expand its terror network beyond the Middle East, using Hezbollah and splinter groups of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to recruit and train sleeper cells in foreign countries.
The manner in which Tisdall and his Guardian colleagues almost uniformly contextualize the regional tension in a manner which frames Israel and the West as the warmongering aggressors and Iran as the victim of such (imperialist) aggression represents another instructive example of Guardian Left ideology.
The anti-imperialism which inspires such moral inversions, and informs their journalistic activism, is one of the more salient factors in properly understanding the institution’s near universal lack of moral sympathy for the Jewish state and the very real dangers the country faces.
The Guardian’s anti-Zionism doesn’t occur in an ideological vacuum and, as such, their coverage of the Iranian nuclear issue should necessarily be seen as part of their broader perverse understanding of what stances their “liberal” political package demands.
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