Tonight's Question Time will be fun. Mehdi will call everyone who disagrees with him an Islamophobe, bigot, racist, etc etc etc.
Mixu - for me, Mehdi Hasan's words are not a smear. Its interesting to note how someone who can use rhetoric describing people as being like animals, beasts, of no intelligence, for no other reason than that they are not of the same religion as him, can simultaneously be a public figure who is not held to account for those words. If anyone used that kind of rhetoric about Muslims (or any other group or minority) they would be hounded out of public life. Why is that?
But they are not though are they. For example, from a sample of 56 men, of whom 50 were pakistani, in one part of the North of England, which is highly populated by Pakistanis, Melanie Phillips concluded that the majority of people involved in this sort of crime are Muslim (not Pakistani, but Muslim in general) and saying that it is a religious animosity, as they target Sikh and Hindu girls as well. Despite the fact that the real statistics shows that about 80% of people in jail for sex offences are white, which reflects the general demographic of the country. But Melanie Philips hasn't been hounded out of public life! Not even Nick Griffin has been hounded out of public life; rather the opposite. He is increasingly being invited on TV to discuss his opinions!
As for Mehdi Hasan, I don't think you can judge him just from a couple of very short clips on Harry's Place and youtube. I am obviously not defending his not very carefully chosen words in those 45 seconds, but If you look at some of the other words he said from this talk, he really doesn't sound like an Islamist at all but actually quite tolerant and inclusive.
The Middle East, despite all its oil wealth…is an intellectually stagnant area of the world, where one in three Arabs, 65 million human beings, Muslims, are functionally illiterate, of which two thirds are women. 10 million children in the Middle East have never stepped foot inside a classroom, inside a school. That is the modern Muslim legacy. The Middle East…is now intellectually closed off to the outside world. … Closed off to the world – and let s not hear any of this nonsense about foreign literature, or foreign books, or foreign languages, being alien to Islam. It is the only way to learn, to open your minds to non-Muslims, to open your minds to other cultures, to learn foreign languages.
He seems to be lambasting the Muslim world for being hostile to non islamic knowledge, culture and languages. He also refers to "our Jewish brethren who we spend so much time fighting with" in this same speech, not "those evil Jews who control the whole world and the banks and america blah blah blah".
He doesn't sound much like an Islamist to me.
Topic: Douglas Murray & Mehdi Hasan on Question Time