Mehdi Hasan speaks out

The veteran journalist on sympathy for Ukraine versus for Gaza, the smearing of new protests and sanitizing of old ones, and whether Fox News should be banned. Plus: You asked, and we’ve got audio!

Context. Is there a less sexy word in the English language? Or a more important one?

The journalist Mehdi Hasan has long been a relentless advocate for context. As a host and commentator for the BBC, Al Jazeera, and MSNBC, Hasan has always challenged assumptions and filled in historical blind spots, with a devotion to doing the extra research and a willingness to speak truth to power.

Now he has left his corporate media days behind him and has launched his own, independent media company, Zeteo, which aims to take on some of the most difficult reporting challenges of our time, with a focus on democracy and human rights.

We talked to Hasan about how he views the student protests, what American responses to the Ukraine and Gaza wars tells us about the limits of empathy, the challenges of reporting the news in an age of threats to democracy, how many admire activists only once they’re dead, and why it’s so so difficult to have a debate with opponents who can’t even agree on basic truths.

To listen to a full audio version of the interview, click on the link below. You won’t want to miss it! And we’ll be working to bring you more audio versions of our interviews and more over the coming weeks and months.

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One of my mantras is that progressive and liberal folks should fly the flag and claim the flag more and not concede patriotism to jingoists. And I saw the strangest thing happen with the invasion of Ukraine: all these liberals and progressives who don't fly the American flag started flying Ukraine flags.

Putting it on their Twitter bios and putting it on the Kennedy Center.

It's, of course, wonderful to have empathy for people enduring a brutal invasion. But could you break down why you think what happened to people in Ukraine caused such a surge of empathy in the United States, and why what has happened to Palestinians has not caused that same surge of empathy?

The short answer is Ukrainians are white and Palestinians are not. The longer answer is there's a history with Russia and it isn't the same case with Israel. Israel is our ally. Russia is our enemy, in some ways our cartoon enemy. Don't forget: the Ukraine thing came after years of liberals being frustrated with Russia for allegedly helping Donald Trump get elected, blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton's loss. 

For years and years, the Republicans had been the hawks on Russia, and the Democrats were like, "Let's reset relations." Remember Barack Obama got in trouble for saying “reset.” And then obviously after 2016, it switched and Donald Trump was soft on Russia and Republicans are like, "We love Vladimir Putin," and Democrats became, "Russia is our mortal enemy." 

Look, at the time, and I covered this on my show, multiple reporters made fools of themselves, perhaps unwittingly, saying stuff like, These are blonde-haired, blue-eyed people. I remember one reporter said, It's shocking what's happening in Ukraine. It's not Iraq or Syria.

It was like, "You're not supposed to say that, but it's true."

I always recommend more subtlety with racism.

More subtlety. If somebody writes a book about the last ten years, I think Quiet Part Out Loud would be a good title. It covers a lot of stuff. 

Look, I very much support the Ukrainian right to freedom from occupation. The problem is when I analogize that to Palestine and say, "Well, I also support Palestinian freedom against occupation," I'm attacked as an extremist, a radical, an anti-Semite. Remember, Joe Biden went out of his way to compare Hamas to Russia and Israel to Ukraine, and I pointed this out on MSNBC at the time and got attacked online for saying that the rest of the world sees Israel as Russia and sees the Palestinians as equivalent to the Ukrainians. 

I'm a guy who watched both the original Red Dawn and the crappy remake of it. And I always just laugh to myself thinking Americans have this great mythic ideal of us and our guns, what we would do if somebody invaded America. About what kind of resistance movement the most heavily armed nation on planet Earth would mount if we were occupied for decades on end. And we just don't apply that to others in the same way. 

Let's be honest, a lot of it is ignorance. If you ask the average American, they think Palestine is occupying Israel. They just don't understand the contours of this conflict, the history of this conflict, who's being oppressed, what's actually occupied. So, for example, October 7 is framed as an invasion of Israel by Hamas, without the idea that Hamas was controlling a territory that is legally occupied by Israel and besieged by Israel.

Ukraine is so fascinating because it's clarified so much about the debate, over both media coverage and politics. In the media, we're told all the time, "Oh, neutrality, impartiality on Israel and Palestine." We never had it on Ukraine and Russia. Go look at BBC headlines about Russian bombing of Ukraine, and then go read BBC headlines about Israeli bombings of Gaza. Look at the difference: the passive voice in the latter, the inability to assign responsibility, the lack of emotive language. When it's Russia and Putin, we can say whatever we want in our neutral media, but when it's Israel and Palestine, every journalist in America knows you have to tread very carefully.

I don't want to turn you into a conspiracy theorist, but hearing you on Russia I've been very curious about the mechanisms and nature of Russian influence on the United States in this period. Obviously, there are social media campaigns; we interact with trolls and bots whether we realize it or not. And then there were questions about whether certain members of Congress were on a payroll. But given how quickly the Republicans became a pro-Russia party, given that some of the really extreme MAGA folks seem to literally be doing Putin's bidding, what do you imagine are the actual mechanisms here? Is it just intellectual sympathy? Do you wonder about more nefarious things?