Friday Prayers at the New Statesman [incl. Tariq Ramadan]

More people moan about the New Statesman than buy it. They usually start by saying, “this once great magazine”. I won’t because I think the New Statesman was always mostly rubbish.

But events over the last year have made it decline faster than even the magazine’s greatest detractors could have hoped.

This week the magazine presents another “Islam special”. The front-page headline tells us in big letters: “Everything you know about Islam is wrong”.

Now that is almost certainly true for New Statesman readers. And if it weren’t the case before this edition, it certainly will be afterwards for anyone who tries to read through it.

The contents waffle interminably, led by Brother Tariq Ramadan and the head of the “Respect” Party Salma Yaqoob. Lovely.

But why has the Left’s favourite magazine ended up thinking that the way to boost its tiny and dwindling circulation is to become an Islamic magazine? Might it by any chance have anything to do with the appointment last year of a new political editor, Mehdi Hasan? I’ve written about him before here.

Hasan appears to be doing everything he can to chase any non-Muslim readers away from the magazine. Though this might upset the Statesman’s owner, it couldn’t possibly upset Hasan, who has a dim view of the worth of us non-Muslims.

If anyone would like to see what the political editor of the New Statesman thinks of non-Muslims they can see them here. This is a link to a particularly sectarian sermon by the political editor of the New Statesman. There’s a phrase I never expected to write.

Hasan believes those of us who are not Muslims are mere “cattle”, beasts unable to control our instincts. Do watch this excerpt from a sermon of his in which he says:

“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.”

Anyhow – I don’t care about the New Statesman. I’ve been spending the evening in the pub with the other cattle and beasts.

[Editorial note: no copies of the New Statesman were bought during the writing of this article]

See more on this Topic
George Washington University’s Failure to Remove MESA from Its Middle East Studies Program Shows a Continued Tolerance for the Promotion of Terrorism
One Columbia Professor Touted in a Federal Grant Application Gave a Talk Called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy’