In the early 2000s, during the fleeting promise of the Arab Spring, we were told there was a new generation of brave Arab voices, pro-democracy, liberal, ready to break the centuries of authoritarianism that had marred their societies. One of them was Bassem Youssef. A surgeon by training, he became the voice of millions of angry Egyptians frustrated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule of their country. He used razor-sharp satire to parody Egyptian generals, earning the moniker of Egypt’s Jon Stewart - after the acerbic host of The Daily Show, who found fame trashing the Bush presidency to his coastal, liberal audience.
But Egypt is not America, and Bassem’s cheerleading of the anti-Muslim brotherhood movement was not confined to jokes and silly impressions. He’s been accused of mocking a bloody massacre in which 1000 Egyptians were killed on the streets of Cairo, and in his often well-placed desire to oust Islamists from government, he vilified millions of Egyptians as domestic enemies to support a military coup - all in the name of free speech and “liberal values.”
This is not the Bassem Youssef the Western World sees. In various fawning interviews, Youssef the social media star comes out. With his dazzling blue eyes and shock of silver hair, the elder statesman of anti-Islamism goes out to justify and excuse the violent Islamists in Hamas.
Since October 7, like so many who have used the suffering to inflate their public personas, Youssef has been given a platform to sound off in the name of “balance.”
But like so many that sip the poisoned chalice of viral fame, the views Bassem’s espousing have only got more extreme. In a podcast a few months ago, he said that Israel has been “corrupting the West morally for 100 years.” He was not challenged on this.
Never mind the fact that Israel has only existed for 76 years, or that the Holocaust was perpetrated by the West against Jews, or even that the West doesn’t have a monopoly on violence (Tiananmen, Rwanda, Syria, etc etc) the problem is all Israel. And in recent weeks, he’s gone further still. On a podcast with American provocateur Theo Von, Bassem makes allusions to Jews controlling the media, saying he can’t spell it out too much, for fear of being labelled an antisemite - a label he wears almost as a badge of honour, while simultaneously mocking anyone who suggests his change of views towards Islamists might be motivated by something more sinister.
The aesthetic he wears, of a liberal comedian who’s just had enough, allow him to sneak into the discourse and perpetuate the brain-rotted conspiracies he’s become so enamoured with. In another podcast since the war started, he accused Israel of ‘kidnapping Yemeni children to implant semitic DNA’ - perhaps a more convenient explanation for the ethnic cleansing of the Arab world’s Jews than the reality.
Does it matter to Bassem that Jews don’t run the media? Or even that Jews have been some of his biggest boosters? Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) put him on the world’s radar, t his first film was produced by Sara Taksler, a Jewish filmmaker. That film toured synagogues and Hillel houses across the US, so excited was the Jewish community to support it. Does he care? Probably not. It’s easy to write him off as [an] antisemite, but that’s exactly what he wants, to be seen as a brave truth-teller finding out who you can’t criticise by daring to count the numbers of Jews working in American media. So call him what he is, a man whose brain has been cooked by the conflict and is increasingly desperate to appeal to a more and more radical audience.
There are real consequences to this too. Because Bassem is not on the streets screaming at Jews, but in a nice studio smirking and smiling, he’s taken more seriously. Interviewers who were taken with his seemingly charming origin story don’t have the tools to challenge him. When asked limp questions about his antisemitism, he’s allowed to get away with smiling and saying “I’m a semite, how could I hate myself” a nonsensical nothing of an argument that provides cover for his hate. He says being called antisemitic is “an empty allegation.”
His descent into conspiracy, while not surprising, is disappointing. It’s one of the most insidious developments in the conflict since October 7 that no one can argue with the reality, they have to construct a world in which Jews are the most evil people, that this war is a uniquely barbarous event that has never seen any comparison in modern history. If Bassem’s remarks about how Jews were “morally corrupting the West” by being killed in their millions came out of the mouth of an out and out Islamist extremist maybe there’d be some concern.
But because he’s a comedian, interviewers laugh as they let him spread hate.
