Excerpt:
A couple of weeks ago Mehdi Hasan -- who seems to be the only spokesman Muslims and Islam have in the UK (apart from the BBC's very own 'Mo' Ansar) -- wrote an article for the Huffington Post in which he said that the British writer and conservative, Douglas Murray, 'tried to smear' him. Fourteen words later Mehdi Hasan attempts to smear Douglas Murray with the word 'neocon'! (I'm not saying that saying someone is a neocon is a smear. I'm saying that Hasan takes it to be a smear and hopes his readers do too.)
Virtually the entire article, 'Douglas Murray, the EDL, Dodgy Videos and Me', is based on the argument -- if it is an argument! -- that if Douglas Murray supports the English Defence League in any way (whether he does so or not is not my concern here), then he's a 'fascist' and a 'racist' and therefore can't be trusted and shouldn't even be given any air-time. (The EDL is a non-party single-issue movement which fights against -- amongst other things -- Islamism, Sharia law and Muslim separatism in England.) That EDL-Murray connection is rammed downed our throats repeatedly in this piece. But that's no surprise because when anyone criticizes Islam (or Muslims as Muslims), Leftists and Islamophiles immediately and desperately attempt to find any connections whatsoever between that critic and the EDL (or with other 'far-right' groups) which, they believe, will automatically invalidate all of their arguments against Islam. Nonetheless, citing EDL -- or any -- connections are, in the end, nothing less than tarted-up examples of the ad hominem argument. A public-school boy like Mehdi Hasan should know that. So it doesn't help either that after making much -- very much! -- of Douglas Murray's EDL connections, he then informs us about Murray's connections with Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer -- all for good measure. Yes! More smears from Hasan and more hypocrisy from Hasan.