Since the unfortunate events of October 7th last year, an unlikely hero rose to digital screens to push back against the official Israeli and American narratives of the Gaza War: Bassem Youssef. An Egyptian cardiothoracic surgeon turned the most popular Arab TV show host of all time and an online influencer with over 11 million followers, Youssef could easily be said to be the most prominent pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel voice in the West today. Hosted by Piers Morgan and Chris Cuomo, Youssef became the center of the ire and the anger of many pro-Israel voices accusing him of being an ‘Islamo-fascist,’ a ‘radical Islamist Nazi,’ a wild antisemite, and many other less than flattering epithets. Others accuse him of being a fraud and a grifter. What all Youssef’s detractors miss is that the man is the real deal; he is the actual face and walking embodiment of the post-Arab Spring Arab liberalism. He is the face of the world America made: a multitude of uncritical, self-assured egos who are self-congratulating liberals.
Bassem (as he is colloquially known in Egypt) has a general biography that conforms to the pattern of Third World intellectuals or ethnic public figures in the West: born into a privileged Cairo family, acquired excellent modern education, opportunities at apprenticeship and skill training in the US and Europe, and a secular lifestyle. In short, he belonged to the stratum of the Third World upper middle class, whose life was characterized by the high accessibility of the West, its culture, language, and its institutions. In contrast to the downward trajectory of the societies from which they come, constantly falling from bad to worse, the Third World elites’ life is marked by a trajectory of continuous successes. Bassem’s early successes and achievements in his initial medical career foretold a future replete with comfort and security. His qualifications alone would have guaranteed him a prosperous life in an affluent Western city, aligning with his apparent life plans. Yet, like many of his generation, the onset of the Arab Spring changed both the man and his world.
The outbreak of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Egypt was the pivotal moment from which our current political and digital conditions were born. Though the movement originated in Tunisia, Egypt, for a host of ideological, historical, demographic, and cultural reasons, it was perceived as the linchpin of Arab popular and political culture. Nasser’s Egypt, while remembered today only as a historical curiosity, was the founder of modern Arab mass society and modern Arab habits, whether in politics, social relations, or even humor. It was in Cairo that the three main unitary ideologies of Palestine, Islamism, and Arabism, were either first invented or launched to the masses. Thus, when the masses of angry young Egyptians, pioneering the political deployment of recently introduced social media platforms, took to the streets to oust the 30-year undemocratic rule of then-President Mubarak, it was a world-changing moment. Most of what occupies your world today, from unrest in the Middle East, fears of a nuclear Iran, refugees in Europe, the globalization of protest culture and protest porn, social media censoring, and manipulation of Russian and Chinese online misinformation campaigns, started there.
This was the moment that changed Bassem’s life for good. As a liberal citizen of the global American culture, Bassem was a fan of the American TV culture of political satire, of which Jon Stewart was his favorite, which was entirely foreign to Arab public life with its dictatorial politics and controlled media space. The combination of political instability and YouTube allowed Bassem to start producing his own internet show of Egyptian political satire, what we came to call content creation or being an influencer today. The man, like his Egyptian generation, was ahead of the curve. The show was a remarkable success and resulted in offers from major Egyptian TV networks to convert it to an actual show, which Bassem did and ended up creating the most successful and most watched TV programming in the history of Arab media.
The Egyptian and Arab audiences were mesmerized by the novelty. Bassem, with his intelligence and sharp sense of humor, managed to take Arab media and political culture on a gigantic leap forward. Perhaps it’s fair to say, except for the very few sacred cows of Arab culture, such as Allah and Palestine, Bassem’s show was entirely and Americanly irreverent. It ridiculed every single politician, public figure, political institution, cultural artifact, and popular sensation. It satirized and criticized starting from what we may call the generic liberal American worldview and, aside from a few casual homophobic and antisemitic remarks, was bold and unapologetic in its commitments to secularism, liberalism, and electoral democracy.
Interestingly, it’s a worldview that did not need an explanation from his audience and was implicit in all he said. It was liberalism at the level of an anthropological factum. Bassem became the face of what young, Americanized, and digitally savvy Arabs want: to live in the world of Seinfeld and Friends and not of Third World military dictators and religious fanatics.
It was exactly that world of First World aesthetics and American charm that Bassem offered to an eager young audience: a show that is well-informed, nimble, clever, humorous, and witty. The host looked the part, too, for he is good-looking with good teeth, plump with healthy skin, a sign of good nutrition in childhood, yet not overweight, a sign of a healthy lifestyle. His style was modern and quick and a far cry from the stiff pseudo-classical formality of Aljazeera. He directly interacted with street, popular, and international cultures. Even the studio in which the show was held, the Radio Theatre in Cairo’s downtown, was entirely redesigned to look identical to New York’s Radio City. Bassem’s show was one of those artifacts through which people of the Third World could actually experience the complete dissolution of the boundaries that once separated them from that other world they only watched from afar. Figures like Bassem, or Edward Said for that matter, thus invite many men and women of the Third World, the eager ones, to surrender their selves and their fantasies to them so they may invest on their behalf in their own success, becoming that First World flair that people would not be able to become on their own. That First World level of success received its seal of approval when Jon Stewart himself showed up in Cairo to endorse Bassem and his show formally.
After the Muslim Brotherhood attained parliamentary power in 2011 and then the presidency in 2012, there was one man in Egypt who could challenge the sacred narrative, the pious image, and the heroic self-presentation of Allah’s politicians, and his name was Bassem. Given the novelty of the genre, its newness, the inherent ambiguity of sarcasm, the self-doubt that it caused, and the rapid success that was impossible to just cancel in an explosive political atmosphere, Bassen managed to get away with the weekly savaging of the Muslim Brotherhood, their ideology, their history, their politicians, their symbols, and their every utterance. It would not be a shock if it turned out that Muslim Brotherhood officials factored in what Bassem would say before making public announcements. With the stakes so high, at the height of the Muslim Brotherhood rule, Bassem’s show managed to get 40 million viewers on TV and nearly 200 million online.
Without exaggerations of hyperboles, Bassem’s TV career was one of the central historical happenings of the Arab Spring. It is impossible to measure how much influence he had on turning the tide of Egyptian public opinion decisively against the Brotherhood, leading to their ouster in a popularly supported military coup in 2013, but the fact that he indeed did have an influence is uncontroversial. However, it is here that Bassem’s success reveals its tragic nature; a new post-Muslim Brotherhood Egypt had no more use for humor or for Bassem. His show was canceled, and he was slandered, threatened, and subjected to an intense propaganda campaign that utilized popular Arab antisemitism, accusing him of being a Mossad agent and a secret Jew on a mission to destabilize Egypt. The details remain hazy, but he was, more or less, officially expelled from the country and given credible threats, likely a family hostage situation, not to ever publicly discuss Egyptian politics again. From the height of financial success, fame, influence, and love of the masses, Bassem was thrown to the bottom of mass resentment, exile, betrayal, and silence. He fled to the U.S. in 2014.
The new post-Muslim Brotherhood Egypt had no more use for humor or for Bassem. His show was canceled.
The story of Bassem is the tragic story of the Arab Spring and its generation: breakthrough, expectations, disappointment, fall, anger, and lastly, despair. It’s a saga that only an insider knows. American experts are largely clueless, American diplomats are too indifferent and thinking about Qatari contracts after their service, and American professors are busy with their pronouns and genitals revolution.
I followed Bassem somewhat closely after he moved to America. It was a mix of interest, nostalgia, and sorrow. Not being able to return to his satire, Bassem attempted to do what men and women are supposed to do in America: reinvent themselves. But comedy is very culturally sensitive and not easily translatable. His early attempts at stand-up comedy or American satire weren’t promising. The situation in Egypt meant that he couldn’t capitalize on his experience either. The grief of professional loss must have been inseparable from the grief of personal loss. Bassem tried to reinvent himself as a vegan activist and a promoter of health foods to young Arabs. In any endeavor, the beginning is necessarily a caricature, a childish imitation of the banalest and the cliché, yet one preserver and moves ahead from the parody to the authentic. But transitional states are full of pain, riddled with illusion. One can lose oneself without gaining another, arresting our development permanently at the level of caricature. This was vegan and standup comedian Bassem. After making videos that literally removed immovable tyrants, ended political careers, and made others, watching him making cliche videos about veganism was heartbreaking. Crashing down, or rather being pushed down, from the top to the bottom of banal and cheesy is a painful watch but a wisdom-inducing reminder of the vicissitudes of the world and of fortunes. Even more painful was watching him struggle and mostly fail to translate his comical talents from Arabic into English. He often reminded me of Jewish Arab musicians, actors, authors, and other men and women of talent whose expulsion from the Arab world shattered their careers as it deprived them of their cultural audiences, pushing them after once being at the pinnacle of Arab culture, into the margins of Israel, Canada, France or the US, doing menial labor and struggling to survive.
Arriving as a brown, educated immigrant to a racially obsessive and self-righteous coastal liberalism as Trump was becoming its center villain had its toll on the man. He worked with some digital liberal outlets to make funny videos about Trump’s Muslim ban and the scourge of Islamophobia in the United States. Oh, you haven’t seen them? Don’t worry, no one did. Stumbling from the caricature of vegan bodybuilding to that of being the ethnic face of white liberalism’s beautiful soul was just too much to bear. Bassem was getting progressively more disappointed, more alone, and more far. Once at the center of the world, the world is now moving on its own, and Bassem is struggling to find a place to hold in its trails. His anger was sometimes let loose in private rants about the evils of Islam or the evils of Israel. If the former prevented the successful liberalization and secularization of places like Egypt, the latter conspired to prevent such success so Israel might maintain superiority over backward Arab societies. Islam, or really religion in general, and Israel are two faces of the same evil coin.
The same way the Arab Spring sprung Bassem’s life into a whole new world, so did October 7th and its aftermath. It is unclear how Youssef ended up being a recognized speaker for the cause, but a combination of his large following and charisma must have been the reason Piers Morgan decided to host him on his show to present the Arab side. Bassem’s segment went viral. To Morgan’s surprise, it was viewed millions of times more than anything Morgan ever did and thus resulted in a subsequent longer interview. It was Bassem’s unexpected comeback to public life, a return that is also a major upgrade from the provincialism of Arab TV to the center of Western public political media. In a remarkable parallel to earlier generations of Third World figures, this generation’s homeless Arab liberalism might be finding its home.
What is Arab liberalism’s verdict on Israel? Simply put, it is pure evil. A state built on theft, murder, lies, genocide, and endless conspiracies. The history of Israel is that of systematized piracy in which Israeli one-eyed pirates, with the help of American capitalism, murder Palestinians, steal their lands, and then fill the world with their lies. The white European Jews stole our culture, they stole our pickles, and they stole our Semitic race. In other words, it was every antisemitic ignorant cliche shared amongst almost all Egyptians, whether they were Islamists, nationalists, socialists, or liberals. The interviews revealed how deep and ingrained decades of anti-Zionist propaganda are in the minds of even the most internationally integrated people like Bassem. After all that he went through in his life, never once did he doubt or try to examine what he heard since he was an infant: that Israel is an evil state, that its history is that of lies, that the whole world in pro-Israel and anti-Arab, that Israel habitually murders innocent children with impunity, and that they control information and media. Bassem basically went on TV to spend hours regurgitating all the trite and banal propaganda almost all Arabs agree on about Israel.
Not only did years of serious engagement with the world never once cause him to try to reflect on what he might think he knows, but years of “enlightened” liberal American life, with the vegan cult and all, didn’t do so either. What is even more ironic, or in this case tragic, is that Bassem, as mentioned earlier, was himself a victim of anti-Zionist and antisemitic obsessions. In 2014, during the state-led campaign that led to his ultimate expulsion from Egypt and Arab media, one of the main coercive tools the Egyptian state used was pushing conspiracy theories and rumors that Israel and Jews paid Bassem to destabilize Egypt. These rumors, along with social media slandering campaigns, had a large segment of the population, especially those who already had Islamist leanings and hated what he did to the Brotherhood, demanding his head. This was around the same time Bassem traveled to the U.S. and filmed a show with Neturei Karta Jews, ironically the Jewish equivalent of the Sharia-loving maniacs he helped to drive out of power in Egypt, about how Israel doesn’t represent Judaism and is, as a matter of fact, antisemitic and anti-Jewish.
Moreover, Bassem Youssef can not speak about Sisi, the current Egyptian President, or Egyptian politics for reasons that likely have to do with the safety of his family. He alluded to this multiple times. Not being able to criticize the dictator who expelled him from his home and destroyed his career but being able to pile it all up on Israel is a major fact that goes significantly beyond the concrete example of Bassem. It is exactly through this mechanism that we may be able to glimpse the nature of the ‘Palestinian Cause’ as a tool of pure political coercion into which so much raw tyranny was poured and through which every hope for Arab democracy, reform, or human rights is strangled to death in the name of liberation, resistance, and Palestine. It is a crime that the affluent kids of Western decedent societies are aiding from their academic lounges.
What does Bassem represent? I believe he honestly and accurately represents the finest products of American cultural globalization: charm, success, aesthetic supremacy, secular mentality, and liberal lifestyle coupled with hopeless superficiality, profound ignorance, and unbeatable arrogance. It is the world made by uncritical minds for uncritical minds. He is living proof that neither liberalism nor secularism automatically generate critical minds or moral characters. On the contrary, a liberalism which became an anthropological generic condition of the modern educated man, is, by definition, an uncritical ideology, a caricature of politics and of morals, and as such, it is unable to face lies, deception or the raw tyranny that fills the world of ‘Palestine’ and its ‘Cause.’ Bassem is a deeply ignorant and self-assured man, and in this, his behavior is no more or no less than the countless generic educated liberals I meet every in America
Those who attack Bassem as an ‘Islamic supremacist’ and an ‘Islamic antisemite are the ones who are living in demological fantasies. They were wrong about Edward Said, and they are wrong about Bassem. Said was quite genuinely a Western thinker of the radical universalist secular humanist tradition. His anti-Zionism and antisemitism flowed directly from his beautiful soul, ‘secular humanism.’ Weren’t it Europe’s great philosophers who said, “Where Judaism ends, humanity begins?” The guy, Bassem, is a militant atheist who, privately, hates Islam. He is, quite literally, the Arab icon of Arab liberalism. It is his and Said’s detractors who are telling themselves lies and concocting myths, comforting lies, as distorted as the ones Bassem lives in. It abused the notion of critical intellect as if it is something you can buy with a degree and vulgarized all that was once admirable. One of the many distortions and childish oversimplifications with which it plagues us is that it convinced many people that right and wrong, truth and lie, justice and injustice, and freedom and tyranny are very easy to understand, to identify, and to argue for. The living proof is Bassem Youssef and his Arab Spring generation, who thought that they were sacrificing so much to push millions closer to freedom, human rights, and justice while they were actually, unknowingly and tragically, enforcing the very system of tyranny that they thought they were overthrowing. If anything, they were modernizing its latest version. Someone might call this the cunning of reason, but I believe we better call it the hubris of men.
In the simplest terms, this article tried to say a few things: first, Bassem Youssef is a genuine and sincere man, what he says is what he thinks. He is not a fraud, and he is not a propagandist, and the man paid dearly, more than most, for being morally uncompromising. The current media Israel-Palestine frenzy suddenly threw him back into the world he once lost, and this must play some role, but this doesn’t mean this caused any deviation in his opinions about Israel and Jews from what they otherwise would be. Yet, his opinions on Israel are the result of ingrained biases and distortions rather than critical analysis, biases whose existence is well known yet seldom taken seriously by any self-respecting American or Jewish policymaker other than through the assurance of Israel’s QME. Bassem is a secular liberal atheist. He is the ideal of American culture today and exactly what many have insisted, and insisted, and insisted, to be what Arab societies actually need so they may advance past their current conditions. He shows how our current celebrated ideals fail to foster critical thinking or moral insight.
There are many threads here to unravel and many potentials for a better understanding of a reality mystified by delusions, incompetence, and vanity. Americans who lived in the comforts of the miracle their ancestors made sneered for years at the societies pathologically unable to exit tyranny to liberty. They underestimated and did not understand the impossible tragedy of trying to escape the endless webs of lies, layered deceits, and the chains of coercion that come with them. These lies come to you as truth, as justice, as humanity, and, of course, as ‘Palestine.’ Now that these chains are being remade anew in the lands of the free, one should wonder if the ideology of the uncritical minds won’t just unwittingly become another link.
