The Mehdi Hasan Test

By James Kirchick

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

On October 3, 2013, the nominally left-wing British political journalist Mehdi Hasan appeared on Question Time, the United Kingdom’s flagship current events discussion show. The panel was discussing a controversy involving the Daily Mail when Hasan, then serving as political editor of Huffington Post UK, referred to the right-wing tabloid as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, [and] gay-baiting.”

 

The following day, a letter that Hasan had written to Mail editor Paul Dacre three years prior popped up on a British political gossip blog. “Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigor, boldness and, of course, news values,” Hasan wrote, stating that he was “very keen to write” for the publication. Appealing to the Mail’s traditionalist ethos, Hasan said that he was “not a Labour tribalist and am often ultra-critical of the left—especially on social and moral issues,” praised “the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies,” and pitched himself as a “contrarian” critic of the left, whom he described as having “lost touch with their own traditions and the British public.” Hasan’s “own unabashed social conservatism,” he explained, “derives from my Islamic faith.

 

Exposed for what he himself described as his “sycophantic” careerism, Hasan tried at the time to laugh the matter off. “Guess what?” he tweeted. “The Mail don’t like [me] very much now. But my offer to write a weekly column for them still stands. :-)” This was not the first time Hasan had been exposed for two-facedness. In 2009, upon his appointment as political editor of the venerable New Statesman and one year before his obsequious letter to Dacre extolling his “unabashed social conservatism” inspired by “my Islamic faith,” videos of Hasan delivering impassioned and liturgically detailed sermons about the Koran appeared online. Non-Muslims, he declared, are “people of no intelligence” and “cattle” who are “incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices.” In another, he equated homosexuality with pedophilia, incest, alcoholism, murder, bestiality, and being “a music lover.”

 

Confronted with these clips, Hasan claimed that he was merely reciting Koranic verses, not endorsing them, a defense belied by his passionate finger-pointing and aggressive tone. When the remarks resurfaced a few years later, once he joined the Huffington Post, he insisted that the videos were “selectively edited,” recited some of the nasty online comments he had received, and denounced the criticism as part of a sinister attempt to “silence Muslims.” When his comments arose again in 2019, he apologized for what he called “dumb offensive ranty stuff.”

 

By that point, Hasan had moved to America, where he was working as an anchor for Al Jazeera and hosting a podcast for the Intercept, a website dedicated to publishing damaging information about the American national security apparatus from a radical left-wing, anti-imperialist perspective.¹ But the exposure of Hasan’s Islamist rantings did little to hinder his rise. In October 2020, the same month he became an American citizen, NBC’s Peacock streaming network gave Hasan an eponymous show, which began to appear the following year on MSNBC (now MSNOW). In November 2023, a month after the Hamas massacre on October 7, the network cancelled his show “in favor of more straight news coverage of the conflict,” according to Politico. Hasan announced that he was leaving MSNBC two months later and, six weeks after that, released a curiously well-produced video announcing the launch of a new media outlet called Zeteo, an ancient Greek word meaning “to inquire.” Hasan continues to host an interview program for Al Jazeera.

 

The reason I identify Hasan as “nominally left-wing” is because while he has become one of the most influential commentators on the American left, he spends very little time drawing attention to the sorts of issues that have traditionally engrossed American leftists: the cost of living, jobs, health care, entitlements, climate change, etc. Hasan’s primary journalistic passion is “Palestine” and the “genocide” he accuses Israel of perpetrating there. Indeed, a survey of Hasan’s work in the three years since the October 7 pogrom gives the appearance of a man who came to America with a single purpose: to promote Third Worldist ideology—and hatred of Israel in particular—among American liberals.

 

Hasan hardly introduced these ideas to America, where they have long festered in higher education and on the outer fringes of the left. But the sudden popularity of Third Worldism in the aftermath of October 7 can be attributed in large part to individuals of foreign origin either residing legally in the United States as visa holders or, as in Hasan’s case, naturalized citizens. Given the nearly limitless number of people who would jump at the chance to become American citizens and who share the country’s values, why is this priceless privilege routinely handed out to individuals like Hasan? The growing number of such cases demonstrates that it is long past time to institute what might be called the Mehdi Hasan Test, the parameters of which would be very simple: People with the views and associations of Mehdi Hasan should be barred from American citizenship.

 

While he now acts the part of a loyal soldier in the left’s coalition of victim groups, Hasan’s mask does occasionally slip. Last year, after President Donald Trump demanded that ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Hasan tweeted, “They literally don’t understand comedy or free speech. We are governed by snowflake morons.” This was rich coming from Hasan, who, after the 2015 Islamist massacre of French cartoonists in response to drawings of the Prophet Muhammad, argued that the most important issue wasn’t defending the principle of free expression but asking whether liberals would publish “cartoons mocking the Holocaust” or “caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers.” Asked by Piers Morgan earlier this year if he was pleased that the Ayatollah Khamenei was no longer ruling Iran, Hasan refused to answer the question—six times.

 

This past September, three days after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Hasan favorably quoted Osama bin Laden: “If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example.…I say to you, God knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.” Though Hasan is Shia, his goal is largely the same as that of the late Sunni terrorist: to withdraw the United States from the world, destroy Israel, overthrow secular Arab regimes, and hasten the spread of Islam.

 

Hasan is highly active on X, where one recent post serves as a paragon of his mendacity. Above a quote from Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly—“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly? Do I drive them into hell?”—Hasan asked, “Just imagine for a moment if the Iranian president stood up at the UN, imagine if Ahmadinejad had come to the UNGA, and said: ‘Do I annihilate the Jewish state, and do it quickly? Do I drive Israel into hell?’ Imagine the Western and global and media response and outcry.”

 

Everything noxious about Hasan—his deception, his moral equivocation, his whataboutery —is on display in this post. Just seconds before uttering the line Hasan quoted, Trump had asked, “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” Clearly, Trump was not calling for the annihilation of Iran as a country but of its belligerently anti-Western regime, much in the way Allied leaders called for the defeat of the Axis powers and not the eradication of Germany, Italy, and Japan. And even if Trump’s language was heated, it’s hardly on the level of a theocratic dictatorship for which “Death to America” is a founding motto. Finally, Hasan’s invocation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling for the annihilation of Israel wasn’t a hypothetical; speaking to reporters at the UN in 2012, Ahmadinejad actually promised that Israel “would be eliminated.”

 

Hasan is not just an Islamic supremacist but what the British call a “chancer,” an opportunist who exploits other people in underhanded ways to advance his own agenda. So consumed have they become with the cause of Palestine that many progressives have been duped into believing that a stealth Islamist shares their secular concerns. They accept the pretense of Hasan as a good fellow leftist, ignoring or ignorant of the spittle-flecked street preacher denouncing infidels in mosques likely under MI5 surveillance. This is the dynamic of the red-green alliance, whereby cunning Islamists manipulate oblivious progressives to further their sectarian goals. The process is furthest along with the Green Party in Hasan’s native Britain, where Islamists are rapidly transforming what was originally an environmentalist party (led by a gay Jew, no less!) into something truly sinister.

 

To be sure, naturalized citizens have no less of a right to criticize their country than natural-born ones have, and denaturalizing a citizen over his speech is an intolerable violation of the First Amendment. What grates is the proportion and intensity of the criticism from people who chose to come to America and were welcomed with open arms. When we listen to immigrants such as Hasan, Representative Ilhan Omar, and others with origins in faraway lands run down the country that accepted them, an obvious question arises: Why did you come here? Tangibly, the answer is straightforward. In America, one can enjoy material comforts unavailable in the lands from which they came (reliable electricity, semi-functional government, the absence of open sewage). But everyone wants those things.

 

The question that ought distinguish those who should become American citizens from those who should not is whether they embrace American values. The videos of Hasan ranting about non-Muslim “cattle” and “animals” alone should have disqualified him from American citizenship. While there’s no evidence that Zeteo is funded by the Qatari government, Hasan remains on the Qatari payroll, and the messages he delivers day in and day out accord with those of his foreign benefactors. It’s decidedly un-American for an American citizen, least of all a recently naturalized one, to tell another that he “should set us all an example and head back to Eastern Europe,” as Hasan once did to Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

 

There are freedom-loving Muslims around the world who would make fine American citizens. Mehdi Hasan fails the test.

 

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¹ The Intercept was founded in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill as an outgrowth of Greenwald and Poitras’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collusion with the NSA leaker (and likely Russian agent) Edward Snowden. See my article about Greenwald and Scahill, “Treason Chic,” COMMENTARY, October 2013.