Mehdi Hasan Plagiarized Pro-Spanking Column

And a response to the cable news pundit’s dishonest reporting on the DHS and his ugly identity-based accusations.

Last week, I published a detailed response to MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan’s recent accusation that journalist Matt Taibbi lied under oath while speaking to Congress.

I explained the process by which a prominent disinformation NGO worked closely with an arm of the Department of Homeland Security to lobby Twitter on content moderation policies. In the piece, I unearthed new information, including new emails from DHS. The piece clearly explains the process that Taibbi described in his testimony and shows that Hasan’s allegation was wildly off the mark.

In response, Mehdi fumed and doubled down. He accused me of lying, of attempting to win access to the Twitter Files by “sucking up to Musk” – apparently unaware that I already had access to Twitter’s internal files and had published investigations using the documents – of careerism, and most viciously and absurdly, of being an Islamophobic bigot.

The cable news talker from the UK has built a career off such tactics, entertaining crowds with his attempts to mock opponents and turn every complicated policy and political issue into a petty slugfest of insults and partisanship. 

It’s worth reflecting on Hasan’s rise and how his attacks on the journalists who published the Twitter Files are shaped by an intellectually lazy form of journalism.

His allegation of Islamophobia, first of all, is blatantly dishonest.

I never said anything about Hasan’s religion. He is referencing an interaction on Twitter in which I mentioned his past work for Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to argue that it was inconsistent of him to exempt his own work from the kinds of criticism he was hurling at then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. He had suggested that Gabbard was acting as a foreign agent because some of her contributors are supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite his own work for an outlet funded by a foreign government. You can read what I wrote and judge for yourself about this supposed “Islamophobic smear.” And you can hear me discuss it at length in a chat last week with Glenn Greenwald on System Update.

Many readers suspected that Hasan’s efforts to paint me as an unprincipled careerist were a case of projection -- of the “pot calling the kettle black,” as the saying goes. These readers encouraged me to look into Hasan’s background.

Before he was shouting down opponents with ad hominem slurs, Hasan was passing off others’ reporting as his own, sometimes without any citation at all. In one of his first attempts at journalism, Hasan authored a column in defense of spanking children, “No Harm In Smacking,” in January 2000, that is nearly a word-for-word duplication of the article, “When to Spank,” published two years earlier in U.S. News and World Report. 

The similarities are apparent from the beginning of Hasan’s piece. “Anti-smacking crusaders have consistently relied upon inconclusive studies to make sweeping over-generalisations about the dangers of smacking,” he began his piece for The Independent, a London-based newspaper.

It’s virtually identical to a line used by co-authors Lynn Rosellini and Anna Mulrine in their news article on the topic for U.S. News and World Report. “Antispanking crusaders relied on inconclusive studies to make sweeping overgeneralizations about spanking's dangers,” Mulrine and Rossellini wrote.

The Hasan piece, titled "No Harm In Smacking,” goes on to copy every single line from the U.S. News and World Report article, save for occasionally swapping out or adding a few words in each sentence. 

Hasan wrote: 

In 1998, even the American Academy of Pediatrics toned down its blanket injunction against smacking, though it still takes a dim view of the practice. In fact, an AAP conference on corporal punishment in 1996 concluded that, in certain circumstances, smacking, or "spanking", may be an effective backup to other forms of discipline. "There's no evidence that a child who is spanked moderately is going to grow up to be a criminal or antisocial or violent," said S Kenneth Schonberg, a paediatrics professor co-chairing the meeting. In fact, the reverse may be true: a few studies suggest that, when used appropriately, spanking makes small children less likely to fight with others and more likely to obey their parents. 

The same article in U.S. News and World Report:

This week, even the American Academy of Pediatrics is expected to tone down its blanket injunction against spanking, though it still takes a dim view of the practice and encourages parents to develop discipline alternatives. An AAP conference on corporal punishment in 1996 concluded that in certain circumstances, spanking may be an effective backup to other forms of discipline. "There's no evidence that a child who is spanked moderately is going to grow up to be a criminal or antisocial or violent," says S. Kenneth Schonberg, a pediatrics professor who co-chaired the conference. In fact, the reverse may be true: A few studies suggest that when used appropriately, spanking makes small children less likely to fight with others and more likely to obey their parents.

Hasan continued:

No study demonstrates that spanking a child leads to abuse - indeed, it may be the other way around. Parents who end up abusing their children may misuse all forms of discipline, including spanking. Contrary to Mr Saunders' assertions, Sweden hasn't borne out the spanking prohibitionists' fears, either. After Sweden outlawed spanking by parents in 1979, reports of serious child abuse actually increased by more than 400 per cent over 10 years, although the actual number of reports - 583 cases in 1994 - was still quite small. Sweden's experience does not prove that banning spanking creates more child abuse, but it does suggest that outlawing the practice may do little to lower the rate of child abuse and instead deprive parents of an effective and common disciplining procedure.

U.S. News and World Report:

But no study demonstrates that spanking a child leads to abuse--indeed, it may be the other way around. Parents who end up abusing their children may misuse all forms of discipline, including spanking. Sweden, often cited as a test case, hasn't borne out the spanking prohibitionists' fears, either. After Sweden outlawed spanking by parents in 1979, reports of serious child abuse actually increased by more than 400 percent over 10 years, though the actual number of reports--583 cases in 1994--was still quite small. Sweden's experience does not prove that banning spanking creates more child abuse, but it does suggest that outlawing the practice may do little to lower the rate of child abuse.

Mehdi Hasan - No Harm In Smacking

50.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

US News - When To Spank

170KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The Hasan column on spanking is a clear violation of the simple ethics code outlined by the Society for Professional Journalists, which is to “always attribute.” The articles are not hosted online anywhere publicly — I found them via a newspaper archive — so I have copied them above.

Hasan's defense of spanking came in response to a letter from Peter Saunders, the director of the UK's National Association for People Abused in Childhood. Saunders had written a letter in The Independent advocating for the government to enact more restrictions on the physical punishment of children.

Later that year, again in the pages of The Independent, Hasan lifted passages from another writer. The Hasan piece, “Arab Bantustans,” uses passages from "The 94 Percent Solution," an article by Jeff Halper in the Middle East Research and Information Project.

Here’s Hasan, writing in October 2000: 

Today, according to the Israeli Housing Ministry's own figures, 195 exclusively Jewish settlements housing some 400,000 Israelis are sprinkled across the Occupied Territories: about 200,000 settlers live in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza (the latter occupying a fourth of the land, including most of the coastline). 

And here’s Halper in September 2000:

Today, 195 exclusively Jewish settlements housing some 400,000 Israelis are sprinkled across the Occupied Territories: about 200,000 settlers live in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza (the latter occupying a fourth of the land, including most of the coastline).

Hasan:

Thus the so -called "peace process" will never lead to true self-determination for the Palestinian people, but instead to their confinement in a number of isolated and impoverished bantustans completely at Israel's mercy.

Halper: 

The term “apartheid” above is intended to highlight those elements of an imposed peace that will lead in the end not to true self-determination for the Palestinian people, but to their confinement in a number of isolated and impoverished bantustans completely at Israel’s mercy.

These articles do not, in themselves, undermine the full body of Hasan’s work. He wrote them more than two decades ago, when he was in his early 20s. Later in his career, Hasan continued cribbing the work of others, but usually with better crediting.

Occasionally though, Hasan’s sloppiness shined through in his work. In his first book, which valorized the life of centrist Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, Hasan used scare quotes to describe Ralph Miliband, writing, that during the Second World War, he was “generally the only Jew, and certainly the only stateless, Belgian-born, French-speaking LSE student among the enlisted men, and the only one trying to set aside time to read Marx's Das Kapital.” There is no indication where this sentence came from. It’s only upon further investigation that I found that it was taken directly from an article published by journalist Andy McSmith in The Independent a year prior to the publication of Hasan’s book. Much of the rest of the book is taken from other histories published about the family, and contains little new reporting.

But even if we assume that Hasan’s more brazen plagiarism was a product of youthful indiscretion, the sum total of Hasan’s antics in public life speak to what it takes to get ahead as a news pundit. He spent much of his days in the UK cozying up to establishment Labour Party leaders – his hagiographic book on Ed Miliband is far from the only example. Now as an aspiring U.S. pundit, he falls over himself lavishing praise on President Joe Biden, and repeating the Democratic Party line on any subject of the day. It’s no wonder that just as it becomes fashionable among many liberals to defend the FBI and Department of Homeland Security from critical reporting about agency overreach, Hasan leaps at the opportunity to lie about Taibbi’s testimony and smear every journalist who has engaged with the Twitter Files documents.  

Hasan is more than happy to bend any principle in the service of his career. The greatest such example is Hasan’s attempt to work at the Daily Mail, seen as a British equivalent to Fox News. On television, Hasan castigated the “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail,” clearly making the case that the paper is composed of unreconstructed racists. That prompted the British outlet to publish Hasan’s own application letter, in which Hasan pleaded for a columnist position. Hasan wrote (emphasis added):

Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists. I also believe – as does Peter – that I could be a fresh and passionate, not to mention polemical and contrarian, voice on the comment and feature pages of your award-winning newspaper. [...]

I could therefore write pieces for the Mail critical of Labour and the left, from “inside” Labour and the left (as the senior political editor at the New Statesman). I am also attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies. I’d like to write a piece for the Mail making the left-wing case against abortion, or a piece on why marriage should be a Labour value, and not just a Conservative one. My own unabashed social conservatism on such issues derives from my Islamic faith.

The Hasan July 2010 application letter to the Daily Mail is worth reading in its entirety. 

There are many other examples of Hasan either using his columns to ingratiate himself with a future employer, or turning the page on his old views the moment they become professionally inconvenient.  

In 2010, while working as a columnist at the New Statesman, a center-left British outlet, he accused critics of Qatar’s human rights record of bigotry against the gulf state monarchy. The position probably didn’t hurt his bid to win a spot working for Al Jazeera English, a news network controlled and funded by the Qatari government.

Two years later, as an editor of HuffPost UK, Hasan argued against abortion being legal. “Yes, a woman has a right to choose what to do with her body - but a baby isn't part of her body,” Hasan wrote in 2012. But after coming to the U.S., where such views are anathema to his liberal audience, he now criticizes anti-abortion activists as being motivated by hatred and white supremacy. 

As long as you adapt to the elite, partisan consensus at these outlets at any given moment in time, you can trapeze from one high-paying pundit gig to the next without fear of being held accountable for plagiarism, careerist pandering, lying, or even past instances of prejudice.

When called out on his flaws, Hasan tends to invoke his status as a non-white Muslim immigrant to silence critics, while lashing out at every political opponent as a bigot. For over twenty years, Hasan has attempted to dominate every debate by asserting that everyone else is racist, sexist, Islamophobic, or whatever. It’s a predictable cycle.

At an event last month to promote his latest book, co-hosted with former Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki, Hasan stressed the importance of using "the R-word, ‘racist,’ which too many journalists run away from."  

In fact, while Hasan’s parents were Indian immigrants to England, he is far from the marginalized character he plays on television. The son of a doctor and engineer, he was raised in London, and attended Merchant Taylors' School, an elite prep school that costs as much as £23,600, or roughly $30,000 per year. He went on to receive his college degree from Christ Church at Oxford, which is famous for training the upper echelons of the UK’s banking and political class. Hasan conveniently omits his privileged upbringing when routinely describing himself as “a brown, lefty, Muslim immigrant.”