Al Jazeera and Huffington Post writer Mehdi Hasan has claimed that Breitbart London makes Fox News look like the BBC’s Today Programme – the latter being regarded as a pillar of the liberal left discourse in the United Kingdom.
Speaking on a panel alongside the Guardian’s Jonathan Freeland in September, Hasan, who is perhaps most famous for his speeches pillorying non-Muslims, gets onto the subject of a Sainsbury’s store in London that took kosher products off the shelf in an apparent boycott of Israeli goods.
With reference to an article by Breitbart London’s Associate Editor Milo Yiannopoulos, in which he argued that the default provision of halal goods was a bad idea, as was boycotting kosher produce, Hasan said:
“…Breitbart.com, which I don’t know how many of you are familiar with, [which] kind of makes Fox News look like the [BBC’s] Today Programme… they ran a piece, I kid you not, saying ‘this is outrageous… people going after kosher meat… we should be going after halal meat!
“It’s almost like we have acceptable bigotries and unacceptable bigotries”.
Asked whether he thought the media was prejudiced, Hasan replied, “Oh the media is definitely Islamophobic”.
Hasan was described by Fox News itself as having “pro Iran baggage” – a claim that he refutes despite having trotted out the Iranian line on a variety of issues including the State of Israel and access to nuclear facilities.
With reference to his videos slamming non-Muslims as “people of no intelligence”, Hasan and his defenders continue to claim that the clips online are taken “out of context”.
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