(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . I came across this article about Mehdi Hasan. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-05-11 I thought it might be of interest to some here on this site. nymag.com/… zeteo.com is his new gig, apparentlly. The article goes into a lot of detail telling Hasan’s story, but here is one anecdote: “...he’s telling me about now, with Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defined the end of his MSNBC tenure. “The Israeli government is very good at putting out a spokesperson. Regev is one of the smoothest operators. Probably one of their best media performers. And that was, for me,” Hasan says, clapping and rubbing his hands together, “a challenge.” Hasan had been following Regev’s career for the past 15 years. Up until their interview on his Peacock show on November 16, Regev had made 13 appearances on MSNBC and NBC’s Meet the Press alone since the Hamas attack on October 7. He methodically laid the rhetorical groundwork for Israel’s siege of Gaza, including the strike on Al-Shifa hospital, which has since been reduced to rubble. In his interviews, Regev said the Israeli military would be “surgical” and do “minimum harm to civilians,” while repeating lines about Hamas using “human shields” and “beheading babies.” The anchors who had him on, such as Kristen Welker, Andrea Mitchell, and José Díaz-Balart, would lob softball questions in a serious tone: “What specifically is your understanding of what’s happening there?” The moment Hasan knew he had Regev on the ropes was when he said that an estimated 11,000 people had been killed by the siege, citing numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry. Regev interrupted Hasan and started shouting, “That Hamas controls! You have to say that!” To which Hasan replied, “I don’t have to say what you ask me to say.” Still, he had been prepared for this, so he pulled up a graphic onscreen that compared the Palestinian death toll from the past two major conflicts, in 2009 and 2014, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and Israel — similar. When Hasan brought up the images then circulating online of Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble, they had the following exchange: REGEV: Because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. They’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? REGEV: I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died. HASAN: Oh, wow. Hasan pressed on through his list of questions: whether Israel would bomb a school with Israeli children inside if Hamas had taken it over (“We wouldn’t allow them to take over a school in the first place”); the propagandistic tweets from Israeli leadership, including a video of an Israeli soldier falsely claiming that the days of the week on a calendar written in Arabic were the names of Hamas terrorists (“Have you made a professional mistake, ever?”); and the Israeli administration’s genocidal language (“I know my Jewish history”). For people looking for accountability from an Israeli official, the exchange provided a brief flash of sanity. Even though the interview aired on Peacock, the NBC streaming service barely anyone watches, it went viral once Hasan tweeted it out to his million-plus followers. Two weeks later, MSNBC canceled his show.” I found the article very interesting. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/11/2240231/-I-came-across-this-article-about-Mehdi-Hasan?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/