Why does Mehdi Hasan reject US State Department propaganda about Palestine but cite it against China?

  • supersolid_snake
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    25 days ago

    That’s the service he provides. He is a careerist. There is actually a letter leaked where he wrote to some conservative paper saying “i can criticize the left as a ‘leftist’ and Muslims as a ‘muslim’”. He is not even from west Asia, not that it should matter, but people give him more credence because brown guy equals from mid east apparently. He sucks, he is a fraud. So is al jazeera and mid east eye. They are ok on palestine so they can spread imperialist propaganda on everything else.

    • OrnluWolfjarl
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      25 days ago

      To add to this, Mehdi Hassan is a chameleon.

      He started his career as a conservative Muslim activist, advocating for the sexist traditions of Islam among other things. There are videos of him speaking with a heavy arabic accent about it (apparently he gained his british accent as soon as he started working with british media). He’s done his best to scrub this from the internet.

      He’ll change anything about himself if it means advancing his career.

      • supersolid_snake
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        24 days ago

        Oh yes, I forgot about that video. Good thing for the Grayzones reporting. Regardless of some of the views of the founders aside, they do good reporting.

  • cfgaussian
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    24 days ago

    It’s called controlled opposition. The managers of empire know there is a significant chunk of people they simply cannot win over on the Palestine issue, it’s just too obvious what is happening there. So they funnel them in a controlled way into at least being on board with the other imperialist projects, particularly those targeting Russia and China. This is especially effective on liberals.

    They also do this the other way around (to a lesser extent) with the conservatives who they can’t get on board with the war on Russia, so instead they try to keep them in the pro-Zionist or at least in the anti-Iran camp.

    This way they prevent anti-imperialist unity and make sure that there is no significant chunk of the population that stands in solidarity with all the enemies of the empire at once. The idea is that most people will at least be convinced by some of the propaganda and will go along with at least one imperialist war.

    They just need to find the right hook for each audience, e.g. “human rights” for liberals, islamophobia/racism for conservatives, etc.