Ten years later, despite numerous obstacles (the book’s release was stopped by authorities in 2008 and again in 2016), Malik returns to this extraordinary tale. He asks where we can place our trust – in reams of evidence, in a government we believe is on our side, in a terrorist who swears he’s changed, in a friend who has no one else to turn to. Malik explores the uncomfortable questions about why he, as well as the wider media and the nation, surrendered to fear so easily. And he reveals how the age of terror laid the groundwork for an era of fake news and demagogues.

Malik will be joined in conversation with James Brabazon, an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and author of the critically acclaimed memoir My Friend the Mercenary.

‘Gripping and disquieting, this true story of homegrown terrorism and shifting allegiances is as thrilling as any spy novel. I devoured it in a single sitting.’ CAL FLYN

‘This book has literally kept me up at night way past bedtime… so riveting.’ KATE KILALEA

Speakers

James Brabazon is an award-winning frontline journalist and documentary filmmaker. Based in London, he has travelled in over seventy countries, investigating, filming and directing in the world’s most hostile environments. His awards include the Rory Peck Trust International Impact Award, the Rory Peck Freelancer’s choice Award, the IDA Courage Under Fire Award and the FPA’s TV News Story of the Year. He has made over forty films broadcast by the BBC, Channel 4, HBO, CNN and the Discovery Channel. He lectures on the ethics and practicalities of reporting from war zones and his reportage has been published in the Observer and the Guardian. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir My Friend the Mercenary. He released his first novel, The Break Line, last year.

Shiv Malik is a former investigative journalist who – alongside reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan – worked for the Guardian for five years breaking exclusive front page stories on everything from UK austerity to secret ISIS documents. He is the co-author of the 2010 cult economics book Jilted Generation and co-founder of a think-tank, the Intergenerational Foundation. He now contributes to the open source, Smart City technology project Streamr and is a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze.

It’s easy to blame Russian trolls, Facebook news feeds, or the sinister manipulation of ‘big data’ — but these are all symptoms of an abusive thirty-year relationship between politics, the media, and a new information age.

Interviewing everyone from Tony Blair to Michael Gove, top journalists to Russian bloggers, and tech giant execs to online activists, Tom Baldwin describes a vicious battle for control of the news agenda, at the expense of public trust and the value of truth. He talks with Sky News Editor-at-large and former Political Editor Adam Boulton to show how technological change has hollowed out space for virulent new populist alternatives, including the so-called ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-left’. And he warns that not only extremists, but also the progressive centre, may now decide to press ‘delete’ on liberal democracy altogether.

Ctrl Alt Delete is a brutally honest and sometimes funny account of how our democracy was crashed — and whether we can still re-boot it.

Tom Baldwin 

Tom Baldwin has spent the best part of three decades in the thick of politics and the media. He has worked as communications director for the Labour Party, political editor of The Sunday Telegraph, assistant editor of The Times, and The Times’ Washington bureau chief

Adam Boulton

Adam Boulton is currently the Editor-at-large of Sky News, and presenter of All Out Politics & Week In Review. He is also the former political editor of Sky News. He was previously the political editor of TV-am, an ITV early-morning broadcasting franchise holder. He held the post of Sky’s Political Editor since being asked to establish its politics team for the launch of the channel in 1989. He is the former presenter of Sky News’ Sunday Live with Adam Boulton, and presented a regular weekday news and political programme on Sky News, entitled Boulton and Co from 2011 to 2014.

There’s nothing like the subject of sex to get a room of adults giggling, as Shereen El Feki proved when she came to talk about her new book, Sex and the Citadel at The Frontline Club on Tuesday 16 April.

Speaking to columnist and broadcaster, Jenni Russell, the former Economist writer and Al Jazeera correspondent talked about her book, for which she travelled around the Arab world to try to understand the region’s relationship with one of their most taboo subjects – sex.

Shereen El Faki     Photo: Alexandra Glynn

El Feki enlightened the audience to a surprising history lesson of sex in the Arab region:

“The West looks at the Arab world and sees it as incredibly buttoned up and intolerant when it comes to sex. But if we go back a millennium, the criticism of Arab cultures and Islamic culture was that it was too sexed up. Even the Prophet Muhammad used to talk extensively about sex,” she said.

“This is important to know because when young people ask today, ‘Why do we have the taboos we have today?’, they are often confronted with religious conservatives who say you can’t talk about this, it’s against our traditional values as Muslims. My message in the book is that when Arabs were at the height of their civilisation; their political, economical and social power, they were at ease in their sexual skin. And that is not a coincidence.”

Explaining why she decided to address this issue, El Feki revealed the darker side to her project:

“Because of my background in HIV, I wanted to understand what was going on [the Middle East, along with North Africa, has one of the highest rates of HIV and AIDS in the world]. I was being told there is no HIV, yet I was meeting whole families with HIV. It became very clear to me that sex was the stumbling block, and the taboos around sex were a huge obstacle to what is really an emerging epidemic in the Arab region.”

She explains that the ‘Citadel’ of her title was the institution of marriage and how it is the only socially acceptable context for sex:

“The problem is increasing numbers of people in the Arab world don’t fit in the citadel,” she points out. “The problem for these women is they wanted to be able to express themselves in the bedroom, they wanted more, and yet they felt conflicted. Because they thought if they showed some spark they would be seen as bad women.”

When Russell asked if attitudes towards sex could change, and if so how, El Feki emphasised it would be a very hard and long process:

 “Changing this attitude towards sex is going to require a raft of modifications, both in the public sphere and also in personal lives. Legal reform is going to be key, laws across the Arab region are deeply discriminatory towards women. But changing the law is not enough, the absolute key is education – especially in the home.”

“I’m often asked, do you expect to see a sexual revolution in the Arab region, and my answer is that we haven’t even seen a political one yet. So if we’re not seeing this dramatic break from the past in politics, we’re certainly not going to see it in sex because it involves so many other dimensions,” she added.

When asked by an audience member if this possibility of change could draw parallels with the sexual revolution in the West, she explained it wasn’t that simple:

 “There is this culture of confession in the Western world and the ability to speak openly about sex, firstly with religious confession, then in a medical context, and now with the media”.

“What’s different in Muslim cultures is that we don’t have a culture of confession – we have the reverse. We are conjoined as Muslims to conceal our sins. The problem is privacy means we don’t talk about issues we need to talk about now.”

You can watch the event below and purchase the book here.

“’It came out of nowhere because of Facebook and Google’ is not true. It was a long time coming.”

So said Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera English’s senior political analyst and author of ‘The Invisible Arab: The promise and peril of the Arab revolution.’

In conversation with the BBC presenter and special correspondent Lyse Doucet, Bishara discussed his new book which challenges the mainstream media’s portrayal of the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world as a series of spontaneous acts sparked by the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor.

“Social media was very important, but not the reason for the revolution. [The reason] is the young people with a history of struggle.”

“These regions were open to democracy – they were only stopped because of politics and dictators,”

Bishara’s view is that the West has, until recently, perceived Arab nations as ‘invisible’ and so been unaware of the struggle that has been building up for a number of years.

“First, the inside struggle was made invisible from the rest of society by dictators who made sure those who wanted to say something could not say it. People were imprisoned, tortured, censored, kept away from the media – even sent into exile or to their death.

“Outside, they were made invisible by a media paradigm – [they were seen as] a threat to energy security, a threat to Israeli security, and a threat to national security.”

These feelings are historical, deep-rooted and inevitable, he said.

“There was a massive demand for radical change, and a break from the past was indispensable. It was a collective break that is psychological, political and mental.”

But he warned that the struggle has a long way to go yet, despite much of the western media drawing its attention away from the events which continue to unfold in the ‘Arab Spring’ countries. Predicting more violence to come, he emphasised that these revolutions do not have a specific timeline and it was impossible to tell when they would be over. But he said that he is optimistic, as this young generation has embraced pluralism.

“Arabs know their future is going to look nothing like the past. They have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

“I see a lot of violence coming our way. But Yemenis, Egyptians, Tunisians… they want to be funny, they want to be creative, they want to be non-violent, they want to be girls and boys together in a revolution. It’s miraculous. They are the miracle generation.”

“A lot of us project the view on these revolutions, asking ‘where is the democracy?’” he added.

“It will come as it comes. We have to take them as they are. I am at least optimistic that we are breaking from the past. There are perils and pitfalls – it’s up to this new generation to move their society on the right track.”

Watch the whole event here: