The writer and commentator Mehdi Hasan has been speaking ‘faeces unto nation’ for many years now.  The evidence has been coming out or a while that Hasan is one of those who will speak one thing to an Islamic audience, as this article shows, and a completely different thing to a non-Muslim one.

This article by Saif Rahman, founder of the Humanist and Cultural Muslim Association, takes on Hasan and exposes him as a man who ‘has a bit in common with Islamists’

Mr Rahman said:

“He is the UK’s political director of the Huffington Post, appears regularly on BBC’s Question Time, has 122,000 followers on Twitter and a monthly Al-Jazeera TV slot (a channel that boasts broadcasting to 40-60 million people daily in the Arab world).

And anyone who knows me will be aware that I’ve always been keen to expose poor role models within the Muslim community.  Recently we delivered the coup de grace to Muhammad Ansar, the media’s favourite Muslim “public commentator” resulting in the viral #MoCV hashtag, after he had been falsifying claims of being a lawyer, lecturer, community leader, an imam etc. Although he’s not quite in the same league, I would argue Mehdi is more harmful & pernicious.  Unlike MoAnsar’s scrappiness which led to his ultimate demise, Mehdi is wary about the spats he chooses to engage in and his slicker performance lends him a free pass from our generally forgiving public.  It’s about reading between the lines.

I tried to find a journalist to unravel Mehdi and despite offering to help in this endeavour, not a single journalist was willing to take it on.  Journalists are a tighter knit community than I first expected. Few are willing to poop on their own doorstep and even fewer are willing to take on an influential media man with a large following. I came to the conclusion Mehdi was untouchable. Or almost, until i decided to write it myself.

At first I was reluctant to do so. I knew it would alienate much of my traditional centre-left humanist and cultural Muslim following. Our Facebook group has 17,000 members and is a regular fixture for many who flock to it to make a daily pilgrimage; there one member from a Muslim background wrote:

“Good stuff, more exposure needed on spurious moderates who wear one hat for a Muslim audience and another one around non-Muslims”

and another lamented:

“What I honestly don’t get is why so many people on the “progressive” left go for people like him. He’s a closet Islamic supremacist who tried to wh*re himself to the Daily Mail and whose only brush with consistency is his hypocrisy.  Why does anyone still listen to him?”

Read the rest here:  http://my.telegraph.co.uk/saifrahman/saifrahman/129/mehdi-hasan-the-great-pretender-2/

Maybe it’s time that media organisations such as the BBC did a little bit more vetting of those Islamic speakers that they have on programmes like Question Time.  They should also start to realise that people like Hasan and Mo Ansar are part of the problem of Islamist radicalism and not to seen as any part of a solution to it.