Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker: the US commentators banned from the UK

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the left-wing US commentators banned from coming to Britain.

0:24A few days ago, Cenk Uygur was at the airport. So I went to LAX in Los Angeles, going to Heathrow. Didn't think twice about it. I have that ETA last two years, and since I'd come to speak at Oxford last year, it was still in effect. An ETA, an electronic travel authorization, allows travelers to enter the UK. But Cenk, a left-wing commentator and host of the Young Turks YouTube channel, was having some problems. I couldn't log on from my computer, which I found to be a little bit strange, but I thought, oh, I'll probably have to give the ETA number at the terminal. So I go to the terminal and a woman comes to help me and she tries to check me in through a kiosk and says, oh, that's weird.

1:09I can't check you in. Let's go look at my computer terminal. And she does. She says, oh, wow, I've never seen this. You've been rejected by the British government.

1:22we're not allowed to put you on the plane you you can't board because the british government has withdrawn your eta and and said you're not allowed to enter the country how did you feel well at first i thought it was a bureaucratic snafu i was like well that can't be right that's absurd i was just there right and there's no reason to ban me uh then uh that piece from the Times came out about 15 or 20 minutes after that. As Cenk found out, he'd been banned from entering the UK, seemingly for things he'd said about Israel in the past. I had said that America is controlled by Israel. And in reference to how the Israeli lobby has given more to American Congress than any other lobby in the last election cycle.

2:09Later, they added to the story and said, Cenk said that Israel had committed a genocide and their acts were barbaric and savage.

2:22And Jenk wasn't alone. He'd been due to speak in the UK this week with his nephew, Hassan Piker, the hugely popular left-wing streamer. But Hassan too had been barred. And as the Home Office becomes ever more hardline, Jenk and Hassan are unlikely to be the last to be banned from coming to the UK to speak. From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hoff. Today in Focus, Cenk Uge on Israel, free speech and his ban from the UK.

2:58So Cenk Uge, you will be a familiar face and voice to many of our listeners. You spent more than 20 years building a huge audience through your talk show, The Young Turks. But But for anyone unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe what you do? Young Turks is the flagship show of the TYT network. The TYT network is on dozens of platforms, including as a 24-hour channel. So you can see that on Roku, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV and so many other places. But our home base is YouTube. We're the longest lasting online show in history. We're considered on the left, and I certainly am. But all of our hosts have slightly different positions.

3:42So there is no one position for the TYT network, but we are known for being generally on the left. Maybe the assassination was like not something that we, we don't know the full story. We are the first YouTube channel ever. And so that makes me the original YouTuber. Wow, what an accolade. Yeah. We're the longest lasting online show in history. And in fact, I was coming to London to speak at South by Southwest about digital media, which I'm an expert in. So at Oxford, I was going to speak about Israel and foreign policy. But at South by, I was just speaking on digital media. So you were due to come and give a talk in the UK, as you say it.

4:27It's not the first time you've traveled to the UK to do such an event, right? That's right. I've spoken at Oxford twice before and I've been to the UK many times. And in fact, they went and found old blogs from 30 years ago that was some manufactured controversy from a decade ago. Wait, I've been in Britain many times since then. So why are we now bringing those issues up? Oh, so this is an attempt at character assassination. This doesn't have anything to do with what I actually said. And that's because there's no reason to ban me at all. In fact, if you ban me, the great majority of British citizens agree with me.

5:07Are you going to ban your own citizens? Are your own citizens a threat to the public order? And in a sense, they are, right? Because the order is set by the powerful. And so they don't want you disturbing their order.

5:32Kieran Stacey, you are policy editor for The Guardian. You're speaking to us from Parliament. So you're very well placed to speak to us about the decision by the government this week to ban these two American commentators. We've heard this sort of official statement from the Home Office that they felt that this visit would not be conducive to the public good. But what else do you understand about the decision from the Home Office to bar them? Yeah, well, I mean, it comes in the context of a kind of ramping up of similar action over the last few months by the Home Office. Piker and Yuga are by no means the only people to have had their travel permission revoked in recent months to the UK.

6:12They are unusual in that they are on the left of politics. Mainly, we've had people on the right of politics being banned from travelling, whether that's Kanye West or whether that's, you know, a group of activists, commentators and politicians who were banned from coming to a rally hosted by Tommy Robinson, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right agitator over here in the UK. This has been happening quite a lot. And these two are simply the latest to have this happen as a result of action by the Home Office. So Piker and Yuga were due to be travelling to the UK for two events. One was South by Southwest UK, as well as a talk at the Oxford Union.

6:50The Oxford Union have said on Wednesday that they are going to go ahead with the event, but instead do it remotely. But Hugo travelled to Oxford last year without any issues. So what are some of the concerns now that the Home Office are worried about that they've said? Is it recent comments? Because Hugo said they've looked back at comments that he said a very long time ago. Yeah, I mean, first thing to say is that we don't completely know because the Home Office doesn't have to say. However, judging by some of the comments that have been flagged by people close to the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud and have appeared in press reports, Hassan Paikar, I think the comments that come up again and again, ones where he said he would vote for Hamas over Israel, he thinks that Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.

7:37He has described Orthodox Jews as being inbreds. And he's also claimed that America deserved 9-11. As you say, none of these are particularly new comments. But you can see, especially with Hamas being a prescribed entity, why support for what is essentially regarded in the UK as a terrorist organization might have been flagged at high levels within the Home Office. I think it connects to another comment of yours that's been circulating. This is one from January. Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state. I stand by that. For Cenk Uygur, it's slightly different.

8:10His language has been less clear cut. The things that have been flagged with him are he has repeatedly framed Israel's actions as genocide, barbaric and savage, particularly in Palestine. He's accused Israel of using Jews as human shields. Also, there was one exchange on Uncensored with Piers Morgan in which you guys seem to dismiss evidence relating to grooming gangs in towns in the north, such as Rotherham. But Cenk, Cenk, I'm a Jew, right? And I've already sat here and I can say there are huge problems that I find in the Hasidic Jewish community. Why can't you guys, when we talk about the grooming gangs, when we talk about Islamism, can you address it?

8:49Can you shut up and let me address it? Can you address it without mentioning Israel? Or can you address grooming gangs? No, because that's the whole reason we're having this conversation. Because your Israeli buddies wanted a distraction from the Epstein files. That's why they threw this garbage into the media. This has become quite a sensitive racial issue in the UK. And what Hugo went on to say on Piers Morgan's show was, well, these aren't really such a big issue. And he said, in fact, that concerns about this themselves were Islamophobic. Now, I think it is a pattern here from the Home Office of drawing the line potentially further lower down than it might have done in the past as to what constitutes unacceptable language.

9:34Yeah. And in terms of what's led to the decision, we understand that the Community Security Trust, a Jewish security organisation, had raised concerns last week about this scheduled visit and had spoken to the government about it. What do we understand about what has influenced this decision? Yes, we're told that that is the case. I mean, I would say that the CST is in regular contact with the government and will always flag people coming into the country that it regards as being anti-Semitic and should not be here. That's fairly open. That's what they do. I would say that politically part of the sensitivity around this is that the British police have been accused and in fact are being accused again as we speak of so-called two-tier policing.

10:19And that's basically of treating right-wing people differently from left-wing people or in certain occasions white people differently from non-white people. And I think the government's quite sensitive about this. So if it is going to ban people like, for example, Valentina Gomez, a right wing campaigner, agitator, because she was filmed burning a Koran and has referred to rapist Muslims, then it also, I think, felt it was under an obligation to act quite strongly against anybody who had made what it regarded as anti-Semitic comments as well. Yes, so both Piker and Yuga vehemently deny that they're anti-Semitic.

10:58And you mentioned that this is not unprecedented, that there are a number of people who've been barred from entry. I mean, what is the logic? Is there a sense from the Home Office that they are increasingly not allowing people who've said certain offensive things? And is that because there are fears of civil unrest or just merely people being offended or disagreeing? No, they would definitely say that these are fears of civil unrest that they have. I mean, I don't think anybody in the government would say that they are trying to police free speech. Ministers in the department know that if they start getting into an argument about what is acceptable and what isn't acceptable speech, they're going to very quickly be dragged into a quagmire that's going to be difficult to escape from.

11:38So the government would say that they're simply trying to safeguard the public in their arguments. But you have to look at these cases in the context of what else the Home Office has done recently. And in Shabana Mahmood, we have quite an authoritarian by instinct Home Secretary. And in Keir Starmer in Downing Street, you do also have somebody who really believes in the power of the state. and I mean, I wouldn't call him authoritarian, but certainly believes that the state can be used to curtail people's liberties in a way I think that former prime ministers haven't. And so this is within their political philosophy to take stronger action on preventing people coming into the country than they might otherwise have done.

12:16I mean, let's just think about that Unite the Kingdom rally, by the way, for a moment. There were genuine concerns that that rally was going to turn violent and this was going to be an extremely sensitive moment in British political history. and I think that's why they took quite strong action going into that. I just think having set that bar now, officials in the Home Office feel that they have to meet it every single time and so let's see how many others end up falling foul of exactly where the Home Office has drawn that line. Yeah, and I suppose it comes at a particularly delicate moment. Here in the UK we've had appalling attacks on a synagogue in Manchester and more recently a fatal attack in Golders Green at the end of April.

12:57At the same time, we have the ongoing Palestine action cases with prescription of that group. This is a sensitive issue at a sensitive time. And so I sense that there is a lot of politics driving this decision. I think that's right. But, you know, that's part of the job of politics, isn't it? These decisions don't take place in a vacuum. And politicians do have to take into account the context in which they're being made. and there are decisions being made that maybe they wouldn't have done at a more harmonious time in our recent history. But we're not living in those times and so that's why I think the Home Office is being much more hardline than it might have been in the past.

13:49So Cenk, in the statement from the Home Office, which I quote, these individuals, ETAs, have been cancelled on the grounds that their presence in the UK may not be conducive to the public good and that these decisions can be made on assessment to the potential risk an individual may pose to UK society. I wonder what it's like to hear that language. I mean, it's both haunting and hilarious. So they've pulled off an interesting combo there. so their uh claim that if i step onto british soil it will immediately cause public disorder that mayhem will break out well then why didn't it break out when i came last year yeah i mean come on but i will tell you when i first found out it was because of this i i it was a bit of a gut punch and i i'm i have very thick skin and anybody who follows the Young Turks or see me debate knows, oh my God, I could take almost anything.

14:48By the way, Israeli supporters, including Brits, British citizens, have called me a parasite, a cockroach, all on air. They've suggested that my co-host, Anna Kasparian, should be killed. And none of them have been banned. None of them have been sanctioned. This This double standard is so over the top, so brazen that it's become unconscionable. It's, yeah, it's indefensible. Well, because it wasn't just you that was banned. It was Hassan Paikir, the political commentator, a Twitch streamer with millions of followers. We should also add that he is your nephew. When did you learn that he had been banned?

15:34So once I realized that I was banned, I texted Haas because he was coming a day after me. And I said, look, I got banned. So double check. Don't bother coming to the airport, you know, because if they ban me, they're almost certainly going to ban you. And and he said, no, no, I already have a visa. And I said, so did I. So he then double checked and he said, yep, no, you're right. They took mine away as well. They took away the ETA and I'm also banned. So Haas has said some things I don't agree with, to which I say, so what? Every Thanksgiving, we do something fun on his show called Jenksgiving.

16:10and we usually debate. It's the Thanksgiving treat at this point. You know, you have turkey, you watch football, maybe you toss the pigskin around yourself and I and my uncle get together and have a jank-off. That's right, a real uncle-nephew standoff. That's right. I'm on the left, but I'm a capitalist. He's on the left, but he's far more of a socialist. So we have sometimes three-hour debates, four-hour debates once. And so we're allowed to disagree with one another without hating one another, without banning or cancelling one another.

16:53So what do you understand about whether this ban is permanent? I mean, look, look, so first off, as far as I know, only one person has ever had this reversed, and that was Snoop Dogg. But that's when the Queen said he has done no wrong. because her grandbabies loved me back then. That's what it was. They were like, grandmama, we like his music. She was like, well, you know what? My grandbabies like him, and he ain't done nothing in the UK, so leave him alone. He's welcome. Is this really permanent? Has the British government lost its mind? Now I'm going to have to hire a lawyer to try to overturn.

17:33I don't know if people know this, but I'm not that wealthy. So I now apparently have to spend an extraordinary amount of money to overturn these things. And there's almost no precedent for overturning them. So is the British government going to pay us back for this? And I want to be clear, you know, I disagree with some of the things that Hassan has said, but he's never said anything anti-Semitic. Right. They're just disagreeing with our different ways of disagreeing with Israel. So it not only takes away our freedom and has the cost of our liberty, but it's also got a financial cost. Coming up, Cenk on why he thinks he was really banned from entering the UK.

18:25So your views on the Israeli government and its actions are very clear, but as you've said, it was understood that this decision was based on concerns that your presence would risk exacerbating anti-Semitism. critics of yours would say that your statements contain anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Israeli control of governments or media propagating tropes by claiming Israel controls America including by financial means. How do you respond to that? It's utter nonsense and it's done so that they found a hundred different ways to make sure that you shut up and never oppose the Israeli government.

19:07So, for example, big oil gets$35 billion in subsidies every year. That's 10 times what Israel gets every year. That's an absolute outrage. And they obviously control the American Congress. They say, oh, that's okay. You can say that all day long. The only lobby you're not allowed to criticize is the Israeli lobby. Well, I'm not doing the discrimination. You're doing the discrimination. 63 % of American Jews are against the current Israeli government. Are they all anti-Semites? This is insane. No, this is a smear they do of anyone who opposes the government of Israel. I mean, here we've had a spate of very grave anti-Semitic attacks.

19:52There was an attack on a synagogue in Manchester. There was more recently an attack in Golders Green, a fatal attack. The Community Security Trust, the CST, the Jewish organization, has been urging the government to, quote, to act responsibly and not allow the UK to be a platform for Hassan Paikah, who they say promotes rhetoric that includes anti-Semitic themes. I mean, I guess here we are balancing, you know, the need for people to freely go to demonstrations in support of Palestine and Palestinian people versus the safety of Jewish communities and Jewish people who do say that they feel at risk and in danger.

20:33No, that's not how you balance things. And that one is not related to the other. And as Benjamin Franklin said, if you trade your liberty for security, you'll have neither. And that is certainly true. What the British government is saying is if you don't agree to our authoritarianism, then you're a threat to Jewish people in the UK. That's absurd. So what do I say on the Young Turks, on TYT or anywhere else? I tell everyone, do not ever judge people based on religion or race. Not only are we against anti-Semitism and discrimination and bigotry against everyone, but we are religiously nonviolent.

21:14We think that violence of any sort, terrorism of any sort, is terrible. The oppressive occupation of the Israelis does not justify killing civilians, okay? And it's about the most disgusting, oppressive dictatorship you will find on planet Earth. Calling Israel a democracy is invalidating the humanity and the existence of 5.5 million Palestinians. But the fact that they're assassinating our characters, both me and Hassan, and saying that we advocated, in essence, they seem to be saying we advocated for that kind of violence. when we've done the exact opposite. How many times is the British government going to lie about me?

21:54And why are they lying about me? What a bizarre thing to do, to go out of your way, to invent things about us, to ban us from the country. You are not the only people that have been banned from entering the UK. Recently, we've had far-right activists who've been blocked from entering the UK before a rally by Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, including Valentina Gomez, a US-based anti-Islam influencer. We've also had a Dutch influencer and a Polish politician, an MEP. Kanye West, or Yeh, as he is now known, was also banned from entering the country for anti-Semitic remarks. I mean, do you feel that this is a blunt instrument that is being used by the government that is setting an increasing precedent?

22:40Yeah, so look, I don't agree with any of the bans. Like, for example, I come originally from a Muslim family. I'm atheist now. But Valentina Gomez has said terrible, despicable things about Muslims. Kanye West has said terrible, bigoted things about Jewish folks. But I wouldn't have banned either one of them. I'm not afraid of any debate. So we talk about Valentina Gomez on our show. We make fun of her. We ridicule her. And she should be ridiculed for her over-the-top bigotry. But she shouldn't be banned. One more thing about that. So, okay, I disagree with banning people overall. But when you come to the bucket of people who have been banned, so now we have people who have said outrageously anti-Semitic things about Muslims and Jews.

23:25And me? Wait, why am I in that category? I haven't said any of those things. Not only that, I've been fighting against that kind of bigotry my whole career. But because I criticized Israel, now all of a sudden I'm in that same bucket. no that's not fair and that's not right that was Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks my huge thanks to him and also to our policy editor Kieran Stacey you can read all about this case over at theguardian.com you can also listen to an interview with Cenk's nephew Hassan Paikar on our sister podcast Stateside with Kyan Carter recorded before he was banned from travelling to the UK that's all for today This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff.

24:10It was produced by Guy Saffman. Sound design was by Brian McNamara. And the executive producers were Sammy Kent and Elizabeth Kassin.

24:30This is The Guardian.

24:37Thank you.