Mehdi Hasan and the EDL

At the weekend I was on the BBC TV programme Sunday Morning Live. We discussed pilgrimages and the ethics of the banking industry. But the first debate was the most heated. It was titled, ‘Are Muslims being demonised?’

The Huffington Post’s UK political director, Mehdi Hasan, claimed that Muslims are indeed being demonised. For my part I argued that while there are serious reasons – principally terrorism and murder – to be concerned about some strands of Islam, those who would tar all Muslims with the brush of the extremists are doing something very wrong.

I thought it an interesting and lively discussion. However at the very end Mehdi Hasan told a smear which I think needs correcting. It came as a response to my own very brief reference [24 minutes in here] to a couple of Mehdi’s notorious online sermons. These include the one here in which he uses the bigoted slur-term ‘Kaffar’ to describe non-Muslims and goes on to refer to all non-Muslims as ‘cattle’.

Elsewhere on the web is a video of a sermon in which he says:

‘We know that keeping the moral high-ground is key. Once we lose the moral high-ground we are no different from the rest, of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire.’