Mehdi Hasan is now a world-renowned journalist who, in his current persona, is radically critical of Western imperialism and especially Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

But as I have written before, taking influential people at face value is a dangerous habit – especially when they have obtained status despite supposedly challenging power. When other journalists and commentators have been systematically sidelined and forced out of mainstream media, and had their accounts on social media deboosted or even banned, the puzzle is: how did an abrasive critic like Hasan survive and thrive for so long in the famously captured and intolerant UK and US corporate media?

The answer I suggest in this article, drawing on some key pieces of available evidence, is that Hasan was recruited by British intelligence, either during his university days or shortly thereafter. And if that is correct, it means we can learn a lot about modern propaganda strategies, and actual geopolitical intentions, from what someone like Mehdi Hasan says and does.

A short story from Oxford

Oxford is a city famous for many reasons, one of which is the recruitment of spies and other kinds of intelligence operatives. I have many such stories I could tell from my time there, but one in particular helped me to solve the puzzle of Mehdi Hasan.

In the late 2000s I was a student at the University of Oxford, co-chairing a student anti-racism campaign. It was a small group without much impact, but we tackled a few racism issues in the university as best we could. One day we were approached by an undergraduate who said he wanted to discuss co-organising a concert. He self-identified as a British Muslim and said that the point of the concert would be to promote ‘multiculturalism’.

It seemed like a perfectly fine idea, except we didn’t really understand why he wanted us to be involved, or why he was organising it as an individual – rather than representing another student society – and where the money was going to come from.

After some initially evasive answers, he eventually told us that he was actually working for a police project called ‘Prevent’, which officially was intended to counteract extremism in ‘minority’ communities.

We turned him down, partly because it was tangential to our priorities but also because we didn’t appreciate his initial evasiveness and did not want to be associated with covertly funded police activities.

A multicultural concert might seem like a harmless initiative, but it later turned out that projects like Prevent that were part of the UK government’s broader counterterrorism strategy (‘CONTEST’) were involved in more dubious activities like infiltrating Muslim communities and mosques.

An article seven years later noted that:

The post-9/11 surveillance state

As long as intelligence agencies have a mandate to detect and combat possible terrorism threats, it is inevitable that they will try to infiltrate groups they claim are a potential threat. That gives them wide scope for anti-democratic activities that they like to associate with overtly authoritarian societies.

It is popular, for instance, to cite the East German Stasi (‘secret police’) as one of the prime examples of communist authoritarianism during the Cold War, emphasising how they kept files on vast numbers of people and got neighbours to spy on each other. I agree with the negative framing, but the evidence suggests that it is highly hypocritical.

Campaigns like Prevent also encourage, and in some cases require, people to spy on each other, while Edward Snowden revealed that nowadays members of the Five Eyes simply hoover up all our emails, social media, phone calls and web traffic indiscriminately: something even the Stasi could not do.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the infiltration, however, is that some of these operatives appear to have been promoting extremism and intolerance rather than combating it.1 Two reports on Prevent, in 2011 and 2023, provided examples of cases where funding had been directed to civil society organisations associated with or run by people with extremist views. This raises concerns about the real agendas of these initiatives, including about ‘false flags’ to justify even more intrusive and authoritarian powers.2

The context for the creation of Prevent was the post-9/11 hysteria (often manufactured), about ‘Islamic extremism’. And the primary impetus was from the United States, with the UK following along just as it did in manufacturing justifications for invading Iraq. It was then given further impetus by the 2005 London bus bombings - sometimes referred to as ‘7/7’.3

One case from the United States has been fully exposed in the courts and shows how the FBI was indiscriminately infiltrating mosques and Muslim groups. So far the courts have ruled in favour of the plaintiffs who argued that they were discriminated against on the basis of their religion.

A notable aspect of the case is that the FBI operative was advocating extremist views that the groups he was infiltrating were so worried by that they reported him…to the FBI!4

Mehdi Hasan’s seemingly inexplicable extremism

What does this all have to do with Mehdi Hasan?

Well, in the exact same year that the covertly police-funded undergraduate was trying to influence student societies in Oxford, Mehdi Hasan - himself an Oxford graduate - was preaching intolerance in London mosques...

In a series of recordings from sermons given at mosques in London in 2009, Mehdi Hasan can be heard comparing non-Muslims to ‘cattle’, who ‘live like animals’ and are ‘people of low intelligence’, and referring to homosexuality as a depravity.5

This compilation appears to have started circulating online in 2016. Hasan only actually apologised on Twitter for the comments after the 2019 attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He had previously sought to frame himself as being victimised by the far right.

It is notable that Hasan never convincingly explained how he came to be giving inflammatory speeches in London mosques. He claimed in his apology that he made homophobic remarks because of “Growing up in a conservative faith community”.

Hasan, along with his employers and defenders, have also sought to frame his remarks in vague terms as having been made in ‘youthful ignorance’.

But both explanations contradict the known facts. Whether or not the broader Muslim community Hasan grew up in was conservative, we know from other sources and statements he has made that:

• he came from a liberal-minded Muslim family, illustrated by his father buying and endorsing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

• he went to an elite English school and then to the University of Oxford where he appears to have fitted in comfortably to a predominantly white, Christian elite

• his first work experience in the media, while an undergraduate, was from none other than Boris Johnson - who later became Prime Minister almost entirely on the basis of being embedded in the conservative elite in the UK (despite a history of pathological dishonesty and racist remarks)

• his first job was for the mainstream media ITV and then was appointed a senior politics editor at the New Statesman (at the time the mosque recordings were made)

• his politics were either so conservative, or at least completely opportunistic, that he once wrote a letter asking to be hired at the right-wing Daily Mail on the basis that he shared many of their socially conservative views including against ‘militants’.

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The obvious explanation: Mehdi Hasan was a UK intelligence recruit

Given his background, Mehdi Hasan’s explanation for his utterances is not credible. And my anecdotal story from Oxford provides a much more obvious alternative: Hasan was likely recruited under one of the counter-terrorism ‘CONTEST’ projects targeted at Muslim communities in the UK from 2003 onwards.

He was an obvious choice: a talented speaker, from a Muslim background, with a family openly opposed to Islamic extremism (see this letter from his father), socially embedded in the UK establishment, could be vouched for by the likes of Boris Johnson and others in the media establishment, and clearly highly ambitious.6

While it is possible he was promoting extremism for the sake of justifying surveillance, it seems more likely that he was doing so as cover and to make himself someone who potential ‘terrorists’ might engage privately.

Why does this matter? I hope for many readers the answers are obvious. But in case they are not, here are some of many reasons:

• If Hasan worked for the intelligence agencies that would explain his stratospheric career trajectory despite supposedly being a critic of power - just like his career progressed in mainstream UK media while seemingly preaching intolerance - because ultimately those in power know he can be relied on not to really challenge them

• More than that, it shows that Hasan can never be trusted and his positioning as a critic of power is almost certainly false

• There is a high likelihood that, in one way or another, Hasan still answers to a Western intelligence agency or agencies in the UK or/and US

• Given all the above, observing Hasan in this light may reveal useful information about the complex and sophisticated propaganda strategies of these agencies.7

I am aware that some cynics think that these detailed exposes are pointless because ‘everyone knows that all high profile commentators are captured’. Although I have some empathy for cynics, I disagree.

Many people, in the face of relentless propaganda, are convinced by these individuals and trust them. Moreover, simply saying ‘everyone is captured’ is not a very convincing argument. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, we can learn a great deal about how people like Hasan are recruited and created, the propaganda strategies they are used for, and the ultimate objectives of those strategies. All of which, I believe, is crucially important for figuring out how we can extract societies from the authoritarian grip of these powerful interests.

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