Calm down, no one is threatening to kill Mehdi Hasan

So according to CNN, it’s cool to call right-wingers who support Israel ‘Nazis’ but it’s forbidden to liken leftists who hate Israel to ‘terrorists’. That’s the takeaway from the mad spat over a bad joke on CNN NewsNight yesterday. The crass gag was made by conservative brat Ryan Girdusky, who said to the British hack that America has kindly taken off our hands – Mehdi Hasan – ‘I hope your beeper doesn’t go off’. Cue meltdown in coastal America, where the woke are spluttering over their macchiatos about ‘racism’, ‘Islamophobia’ and even, because they are mad, ‘threats to kill’, as if joking about a bomb beeper is the same as putting one in someone’s pocket. So no one’s going to mention what Hasan said, about ‘Nazis’?

It was an unseemly spat, as is everything on the news these days, where the aim is less to engage with your opponent than to gibber more loudly than him so that you might find you have 57 more followers on X than you did before this televised shitshow. They were talking about the US election and Israel and… oh, who cares. Girdusky rebuked Hasan for calling Republicans ‘Nazis’. Hasan said: ‘If you don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing, stop saying….’ He was cut off at this point – because the other side gibbered more loudly; I told you that’s how it works – but it seems safe to assume he was about to say ‘then stop doing, stop saying Nazi things’, or something like that. Pissed off with being likened to the worst mass murderers in all of history, Girdusky said to Hasan: ‘I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.’

Oof. Was it big or clever? No. Was it funny? Depends on your taste in comedy, I guess. It was a reference to Israel’s Trojan Horse-style attack on the anti-Semitic army of Hezbollah, where it planted tiny explosives in the beepers used by those mad militants and then set them off, causing untold damage to terrorists’ testicles and Hezbollah’s command structure. Girdusky’s jest was clearly that Hasan is cosy with terrorists. Of course this isn’t true. But then, jokes often aren’t. Jokes are not journalism – their fuel is hyperbole and climatic twists, not a Woodward-Bernstein devotion to fact-gathering. Should the joke have been cracked on CNN? No, that was dumb. Save it for the open mic at a comedy club, Ryan.

But even less funny than the joke – far less funny – is the frothing response. I cannot remember the last time I witnessed such a confected orgy of outrage, so much ink spilt in phoney anger, such a turbo-smug exploitation of an ill-advised aside in a naked effort to destroy a right-winger’s career and to demonise all right-wingers as loons who hate Muslims. The worst thing is the literalism. ‘Did you just say I should die?’, Hasan asked Girdusky. ‘Did you just say I should be killed, on CNN?’, he barked. Well, if we’re really going to be literalist about it, then actually he said he doesn’t want you to die. He doesn’t want your beeper to blow up. The only thing that’s died here is humour – it was beaten to death live on CNN by the joyless literalists of the tragic centrist Dems camp.

Humour – both good humour, which this was not, and bad humour – cannot survive the self-serving punctiliousness of bourgeois bores whose overriding priority is to take offence because it helps to boost their oppression points. It reminds me of the time a British journalist said Brexit supporters in Westminster Square had threatened to anally rape her. I was horrified. Until I discovered that what they actually said was ‘Shove your EU flag up your arse’. I mean, I knew the media elites were out of touch, but that they were so out of touch they couldn’t even recognise the coarse jostling of the un-PC part of society, which is the majority of society, was astonishing. I feel the same about Hasan crying ‘Do you want me to die?!’ in response to a lame gag. No one wants you to die, Mehdi. Calm down.

Then there’s the double standard. In the very moment in which Girdusky made the beepers comment, Hasan was in the process of making a stuttering justification for his and others’ branding of certain right-wingers as ‘Nazis’. Help me understand this: it’s acceptable to compare Trumpists to the inhuman racists who murdered six million Jews, but it’s not acceptable to compare a hack famous for his contempt for Israel to Hezbollah? You can imply that Girdusky is a Nazi but you can’t imply that Hasan is an Islamist? Personally, I would do neither, being an adult who prefers cool debate over the juvenile hurling of dumb insults at people we disagree with. But I’m nonetheless intrigued that, in CNN’s eyes, it seems one of these things is okay, and the other is not.

CNN threw Girdusky off the panel. It released a statement saying he will ‘not be welcomed back’. It said there is ‘zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN’. Okay, whatever, CNN can do what it wants. But it is not as morally pure as it thinks. In ditching Girdusky and keeping Hasan, CNN was not only condemning the beepers thing – it was also condoning, implicitly, the branding of MAGA folk as Nazis. Is that not bigotry, too? Girdusky can look after himself, but what about the elitist view of ‘rednecks’ who vote Trump as the dim stooges of ‘Nazi’ demagoguery? Then there’s the hysteria on campuses and on the streets, where Israel supporters are frequently called Nazi scum. Is CNN not a tad worried that it is green-lighting such foolish and dangerous name-calling by welcoming people who defend the Nazi slur while banning people who make the beepers slur?

What we are really witnessing is not the defence of some powerless journalist from the ‘racism’ of the MAGA tyranny, but rather the fortification of the victim industrial complex from which Mehdi Hasan and the new elites seek to boost their already considerable clout. Hasan’s rise has certainly been starry – he’s gone from being Britain’s most annoying journalist to America’s most annoying journalist. Now this man whose arrogance is so out of proportion with his intellect will rise even further, by feeding and fattening his social power on this latest ‘racist attack’ that was actually just a shit joke. The beepers thing is the best thing that’s happened to him in years.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy