Mehdi Hasan Sponsors Georgetown Screening of Anti-Israel Documentary Shelved by BBC
The BBC withdrew "Gaza: Doctors Under Attack" after the production team made public statements that the broadcaster determined compromised its editorial standards.
Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, regarded as America's premier training ground for future diplomats and intelligence officers, is hosting a screening of a Gaza documentary that the BBC declined to broadcast due to impartiality concerns.
The webinar features "Gaza: Doctors Under Attack," a documentary that the BBC shelved in June 2025. The screening is sponsored by Zeteo, which also acquired the rights to the film. Zeteo was founded by former Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan, who has a history of extremist rhetoric and moderating conferences alongside terrorist operatives.
The BBC's Rejection: A Documentary Too Biased to Broadcast
The BBC withdrew "Gaza: Doctors Under Attack" after the production team made public statements that the broadcaster determined compromised its editorial standards. The Times of Israel reported that the BBC concluded "broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC."
The documentary, originally commissioned by the BBC and produced by Basement Films, was withdrawn after director Ramita Navai accused Israel of being "a rogue state that's committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians" during a BBC Radio 4 appearance.
This followed another BBC controversy involving a Gaza documentary narrated by the son of Hamas's former deputy minister of agriculture, which BBC chair Samir Shah called "a dagger to the heart" of the broadcaster's impartiality standards.
Zeteo's Acquisition of the Doc
Enter Mehdi Hasan's Zeteo, which announced in July 2025 that it was acquiring global rights to the rejected documentary. Hasan declared: "I am delighted that Zeteo is acquiring the global rights for such an important, vital and devastating film, which has been shamefully blocked from release by the BBC for so long."
The acquisition raises questions about funding sources, particularly given Hasan's extensive ties with the Qatari government-run Al Jazeera.
Medhi Hasan’s History of Extremist Rhetoric
In 2009, Mehdi delivered a sermon comparing non-Muslims to animals, declaring:
"The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as 'a people of no intelligence'... In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as 'cattle', as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world." — Medhi Hasan
This pattern of extremist rhetoric continued throughout his career and reached new heights following the October 7 Hamas attacks. Hasan's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict at MSNBC demonstrated the same ideological extremism that characterized his earlier religious sermons.
Rather than calling Hamas operatives "terrorists," he consistently referred to them as "fighters." He uncritically repeated Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures and frequently compared Israel's defensive response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine — positions that Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute characterized as "extremist views not shared by the vast majority of Americans."
In February 2025, he published a post on X that sparked outrage on after two people died in a plane crash at Georgia’s Covington Airport east of Atlanta, writing “Make American Planes Crash Again.”
Previous Georgetown Conference Platformed Alleged Hamas and PFLP Members
On March 7, 2024, Georgetown University's Qatar campus hosted "On Palestine," a symposium with Mehdi Hasan serving as moderator alongside participants with documented connections to terrorist organizations including Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Hamas.
The most notable participant was Wadah Khanfar, President of Al Sharq Forum and former Al Jazeera director general. According to Palestinian media outlet Raya, Khanfar was "one of the most prominent leaders in the Hamas Office in Sudan" and "held the position of head of Hamas's Political Office for South and North Africa." Khanfar's terror connections extend beyond his Hamas leadership role—he delivered a eulogy for prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi after his death in 2022, with Hamas members reportedly present at the funeral service.
At an Al Jazeera Forum in May 2024, Khanfar praised the October 7 attacks, stating that "Al-Aqsa Flood"—Hamas's preferred term for the operation—"came at the perfect moment for a radical and real shift in the path of struggle and liberation" and predicted it would be "recorded as the beginning of the end, leading the Palestinian cause to something different."
The symposium also included Shawan Jabarin, who was convicted in 1985 for recruiting members for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and serves as General Director of Al-Haq, which Israel has designated as a terrorist front organization for PFLP.
The School of Foreign Service trains students who frequently enter the State Department, CIA, and other government positions where their perspectives influence American foreign policy. To date, Georgetown has received over $1 billion from Qatar since 2005, according to reports from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). This funding relationship has prompted congressional hearings examining Qatar's influence at the institution.
A Pattern of Concerning Associations
This controversy represents the latest in a series of troubling incidents at Georgetown. Just months ago, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) exposed Georgetown fellow Badar Khan Suri's family ties to Hamas leadership. Suri, whose father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef, was an adviser to Hamas's former political leader Ismail Haniyeh, was found to have promoted Hamas propaganda on social media while employed at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His wife, Mapheze Saleh, also worked for Hamas.
The Middle East Forum revealed that Suri had denied key aspects of the October 7 attacks and shared content defending Hamas operations. Rather than distance itself from Suri, Georgetown defended him as a victim of "McCarthyism," with the Alwaleed Center for Muslim and Christian Understanding issuing a statement condemning his eventual arrest by immigration authorities.