Mehdi Hasan’s Terrorist Apologetics Echo Osama Bin Laden

A decade and a half after his death, Osama bin Laden can still count on moronic, morally deranged progressives to parrot his propaganda.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda worked tirelessly to co-opt self-hating leftist movements in both the United States and the West more generally, the theory being that even after watching Islamists murder nearly 3,000 of their countrymen, some would still be chomping at the bit to blame America first. It was a hubristic, surprisingly savvy gambit.

Library of Congress alum and Middle East scholar Raymond Ibrahim first noted this insidious public relations strategy in the 2000s. In its outgoing communiques, al-Qaeda accused the United States of “oppressing and exploiting the Islamic world,” citing its friendship with Israel, support for United Nations sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime and, later, its reluctant waging of the War on Terror as proof.

“Does the prey not have the right, when bound and dragged to its slaughter, to escape? Does it not have the right, while being slaughtered, to lash out with its paw?” wondered a victimized bin Laden.

But internally, al-Qaeda’s leaders struck a much different chord. Their “documents rarely made mention of all those things — Zionism, Bush’s ‘Crusade,’ malnourished Iraqi children — that formed the core of Al Qaeda’s messages to the West,” observed Ibrahim. “Instead, they were filled with countless Koranic verses, hadiths (traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), and the consensus and verdicts of Islam’s most authoritative voices.”

“Put another way,” he wrote, “the language of ‘reciprocity’ was exchanged for that of intolerant religious fanaticism.”

As proof of this phenomenon, Ibrahim pointed to bin Laden’s response to an open letter from a group of Saudi intellectuals asserting that “The heart of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is justice, kindness, and charity.”

“As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s Word: ‘We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us — till you believe in Allah alone,'” replied bin Laden. “If the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy! … Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion.”

Charming, no?

Still, it’s the dead terrorist’s policy-oriented, outward-facing message that his Fabian apologists continue to tout.

In a characteristically impetuous outburst on Sunday, left-wing media darling Mehdi Hasan charged Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with “child-like ignorance” and branded him a “right-wing idiot” for articulating a simple truth about jihadis: “The reason they attacked us is cause they hate our constitution… they hate our values, they hate our freedom of religion, they hate our freedom of speech.”

As proof of Kavanaugh’s supposed folly, Hasan produced a quote from a bit of 2004 agitprop from 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.”

To Hasan’s mind, that settled the matter. If the mass murderer who convinced his fellow zealots to fly planes into a civilian workplace and waxed poetic about his divinely-ordained hatred for infidels once chalked his wickedness up to a disdain for American foreign policy in, again, a propaganda film, then that’s that. Most know him as a silver spoon-fed butcher-turned-resident of Hell; Hasan knows him as Honest Osama.

No doubt about it, Hasan is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person. The kind of dolt who not only would have trusted in 1938 that Hitler had no more “territorial demands to make in Europe” after the Munich Agreement, but, according to his theory of historiography, still believes the  Führer meant it now.

Bin Laden & Co. counted on such simpletons to amplify their message and weaken the West’s resolve against them. They might not have counted on them continuing to buy their you-know-what all these years later.

Hasan is bin Laden’s echo in deed as well as word. Back in the 2000s, he expressed strikingly similar sentiments to the ones bin Laden conveyed in his response to the Saudis.

“If Yazid was not a Kaffir — then at the very minimum he was a fasiq, a transgressor, a breaker of Islamic laws, a corrupt individual, a tyrant, a killer a drunkard, a dog lover, a music lover, a homosexual, a pedophile, a sexual deviant, someone who slept with his own mother,” mused Hasan during an apparent sermon. “The Koran describes the atheist as cattle. As cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”

He later apologized, explaining the comments away by noting that he was in his twenties and speaking extemporaneously. After all, who among us didn’t lump gay people and pedophiles together years into their adulthood, especially without notes to remind us not to?

A myopic hatred of the world’s only Jewish-majority state and the United States, an irrepressible contempt for infidels, and a penchant for holding radical private and more moderate, convenient public positions  — for someone who knows as little about bin Laden as Hasan does, he’s certainly turned out a lot like him.

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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

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