When Frontline member Anthony Loyd found Shamima Begum in al-Hawl refugee camp, northern Syria, he helped unearth a series of unanswered questions for Western societies – and kickstarted a national debate in the United Kingdom. When it comes to citizens returning from IS territory, what are our legal and moral responsibilities? Is there a two-tier system developing, with citizenship as privilege for the children of Muslim immigrants, and nationality as right for European ‘natives’? With first-hand reporting from Anthony Loyd, and comment from columnist Nesrine Malik and expert on jihadist movements Shiraz Maher, we’ll be discussing the fallout of British Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship. This discussion will be chaired by presenter of BBC HardTalk Stephen Sackur.

Chair

Stephen Sackur is the presenter of HARDtalk, the BBC World News flagship current affairs interview programme. He has been a journalist with BBC News since 1986 and has interviewed many high-profile guests for BBC World News, BBC News Channel and BBC World Service. Before taking over HARDtalk, he was based in Brussels for three years as the BBC’s Europe Correspondent. Prior to this, he was the BBC’s Washington Correspondent from July 1997. He served as the BBC Middle East Correspondent in both Cairo (from 1992 to 1995) and Jerusalem (from 1995 to 1997). He has contributed countless articles to The Observer, London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. In November 2010, he received the International TV Personality of the Year Award from the Association of International Broadcasters.

Speakers

Anthony Loyd is senior foreign correspondent for The Times. His career began in 1993 when he started reporting from the war in Bosnia. Since then he has written from innumerable conflict zones, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Chechnya and Kosovo. He is author of My War Gone By I Miss It So and Another Bloody Love Letter. He has witnessed the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the brutal rise of the self-styled Islamic State and the desperate struggle of the Syrian people caught between the two. You can read about his experiences following the case of Shamima Begum here.

Nesrine Malik is a British Sudanese columnist and features writer for The Guardian. She was born in Sudan and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She received her undergraduate education at the American University in Cairo and University of Khartoum, and her post graduate education at the University of London. Alongside her journalism career she previously spent ten years in emerging markets private equity. She was named Society and Diversity Commentator of the Year at the 2017 Comment Awards. You can read her writings about Islamophobia in the UK here.

Shiraz Maher is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a lecturer in non-state actors for the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He currently leads the Centre’s research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and also researches Salafi-Jihadism. Maher is a recognised expert on the current Middle East crisis and jihadist movements. His book, Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea has been widely acknowledged as a ground-breaking exploration of the political philosophy behind contemporary jihadist movements. His writings on the Syrian conflict were shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2016. You can view his comments on the case of Shamima Begum on Newsnight here.

  Watch the video stream of Shamima Begum: A Crisis Of Citizenship

When Deeyah Khan was six, her father took her to her first anti-racism rally.  A Pakistani immigrant to Norway, he promised her that things would get better and that the skinhead gangs that terrorised their family and families like them would soon find themselves relics of past prejudices, that bigotry belonged in history, that tomorrow would be a more tolerant time.

Three decades on, and we’re still waiting for tomorrow.

With a US president propagating anti-Muslim propaganda, the far-right gaining ground in German elections, hate crime rising in the UK, and divisive populist rhetoric infecting political and public discourse across western democracies, Deeyah Khan’s White Right: Meeting The Enemy asks why.

Following the lauded JIHAD – in which she spoke to radicalised British Muslims who had fought in the name of jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Chechnya and now found themselves full of regret – Deeyah joins the frontline of the race wars in America. She sits face-to-face with fascists, racists and the proponents of the “alt-right” ideologies that have propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. From Breitbart’s darling, Richard Spencer to Jeff Schoep, leader of American’s largest neo-Nazi organisation, Deeyah’s need to find the deeper human causes of horrific social forces opens a different possibility for connection and solutions. Rather than dismiss these men as monsters, she’s determined to discover the men behind the masks.

Urgent and resonant, White Right is Deeyah Khan’s most personal film yet. Nominated for 2018 BAFTA Award in the Current Affairs category.

Run Time: 60 mins

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpWUZ3NG_Do

Deeyah Khan

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning and two times BAFTA nominated documentary film director, and founder of Fuuse, a media and arts company that puts women, people from minorities, and third-culture kids at the heart of telling their own stories. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Born in Norway to immigrant parents of Pashtun and Punjabi ancestry, Deeyah’s experience of living between different cultures, both the beauty and the challenges, shapes her artistic vision. Her 2012 multi-award winning documentary Banaz: A Love Story chronicles the life and death of Banaz Mahmod, a young British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honour killing. Deeyah’s second film, the Grierson and Bafta award-nominated Jihad, involved two years of interviews and filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Deeyah released her third film in 2016, Islam’s Non-Believers which investigated the lives of ex-Muslims who face extreme discrimination, ostracism, psychological abuse and violence as a result of leaving Islam. One of Fuuse’s recent initiatives, born of Deeyah’s own experiences, is sister-hood, a digital magazine and a series of live events spotlighting the voices of women of Muslim heritage.

Catrin Nye

Catrin Nye is an investigative journalist, documentary maker and presenter for the BBC. She currently hosts the monthly national debate show The Hour on BBC One Wales as well as reporting for the BBC’s BAFTA award-winning Victoria Derbyshire programme, BBC Panorama, BBC World and Radio 4. Catrin previously spent many years reporting for Newsnight and BBC Asian Network developing a specialism in Britain’s minority communities, an area she continues to work on today. She has also written and reported for the Guardian, Prospect, BBC Radio 1, BBC World Service, 1Xtra, 5Live, BBC Breakfast and local radio across the UK. Catrin has won the Mind Journalist of the Year award, two Sandford Saint Martin awards for excellence in religious broadcasting and was one of the Radio Academy’s 30 Under 30. She has also been shortlisted for RTS Young Journalist of the Year and an Amnesty Award among others.

A Brief Visual History in the Time of ISIS, supported by Newspaper Club, is curated by Magnum photographer, Peter van Agtmael and includes an essay and timeline by Peter Harling, an expert on the Middle East, formerly of the International Crisis Group, and founder of Synaps. The work of nineteen photographers is included in this first newspaper, and the images range from those taken in the final years of the French mandate in Syria in 1941 to the fall of Mosul in 2017.

Each Magnum Chronicles newspaper will be curated by a different Magnum photographer, showcasing the breadth and depth of Magnum’s archive, combining contemporary images with archival to offer a unique perspective and context on global social and political issues through to lighter subjects of general interest. The aim of Magnum Chronicles is to create a series of intelligent free democratic publications that inform, engage and entertain through the use of visual narratives. Each publication will also incorporate collaborations with experts and creatives across many disciplines and fields, and will be in several languages.

Chair

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, currently, for The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, and is the author of several books on Iraq’s recent history, including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq and the most recent The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

Speakers

Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington DC in 1981. He studied history at Yale. His work largely concentrates on America, looking at issues of conflict, identity, power, race and class. He also works extensively on the Israel/Palestine conflict and throughout the Middle East. He has won the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the Lumix Freelens Award, the Aaron Siskind Grant, a Magnum Foundation Grant as well as awards from World Press Photo, American Photography Annual, POYi, The Pulitzer Center, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, FOAM and Photo District News. His book, ‘Disco Night Sept 11,’ on America at war in the post-9/11 era was released in 2014 by Red Hook Editions. Disco Night Sept 11 was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award and was named a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Mother Jones, Vogue, American Photo and Photo Eye. “Buzzing at the Sill,” a book about America in the shadows of the wars, will come out in Fall 2016. He is a founder and partner in Red Hook Editions. Peter joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a member in 2013

Noman Benotman is Quilliam’s President and is an Executive Board Member. He leads Quilliam’s work on de-radicalisation processes in the UK and abroad, working to raise international awareness of Jihadist recantations, co-ordinating Quilliam’s outreach to current and former extremists and using Quilliam as a platform from which to share his inside knowledge of al-Qaeda and other Jihadist groups with a wider audience. He also heads the current research programmes. Born in Libya in 1967, Benotman first adopted radical Islamism in the mid-1980s after reading the books of Sayyid Qutb. In 1989 he travelled to Afghanistan where he fought against the Soviet Union, taking part in battles around Khost, Gardez and elsewhere. After the Soviet withdrawal, he helped set up the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which aimed to violently overthrow Colonel Gaddafi and establish an ‘Islamic state’ in Libya. In 1994, he moved to Sudan where he forged close links with Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other key members of al-Qaeda. Since 1995 he has lived in London where he was initially part of the ‘Londonistan’ scene alongside other senior extremists such as Abu Qatada and Abu Musab al-Suri before gradually distancing himself from Islamism. During the last few years, he has played a key role in the disbanding of the LIFG and the issuing of its ‘refutations’. He is also well known as one of the most public critics of al-Qaeda, appearing widely on international media such as CNN and al-Jazeera as well as taking part in a range of international conferences. He has a degree in Human Development Studies from Birkbeck University and speaks English and Arabic.

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.

Join author Jamie Bartlett in conversation with academic, writer and speaker Matthew Goodwin to discuss the rise of the radical. Bartlett, delves into the disparate worlds of various communities that all have one theme in common – to seek to live radical lives in the world today. From talking to transhumanists in Las Vegas, to  nationalist, anti-Islam supporters in Germany, or visiting the Psychedelic Society in the Netherlands; these are just a few of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and they have the answers to fix it.

Jamie Bartlett is a leading thinker in extreme politics and technology. He is a journalist and tech blogger for The Telegraph and Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media for Demos in conjunction with The University of Sussex. His primary areas of interest include the use of social media by political movements and law enforcement agencies and internet culture, the dark net and crypto-currencies. Bartlett is also the author of The Dark Net Inside the Digital Underworld.

Matthew Goodwin is a writer and speaker known for his work on British European politics, populism, Brexit and elections. He is Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. For more information you can visit here.

Using fringe social media platforms like 4chan, an anarchic and anonymous message board, and automated accounts on Twitter, they have been credited with rallying support for Donald Trump, spreading the story of French President Emmanuel Macron’s leaked emails ahead of this year’s French elections and some argue the rise of the AfD party in Germany.

But who is behind this movement, what do they want? Are they gaining an outsized influence on global politics? Join us for a panel discussion, analysing the varying impact the movement has had in the US and across Europe, as well as the increasing splinter groups straying from the umbrella of the Alt-Right, and the future of the movement.

Chair

Mike Wendling is a reporter, radio journalist and author of the forthcoming book “Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House” (Pluto Press, April 2018). He works within the BBC’s Digital Current Affairs department, where he is a blogger and editor at the BBC’s experimental social news unit, BBC Trending. He’s produced and presented dozens of documentaries for Radio 4 and the World Service about US politics including the series America’s Own Extremists, and programmes about Native Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Speakers

Megha Mohan is a presenter/reporter at the BBC’s social news unit BBC Trending. There, she has reported and field produced on subcultures on the internet across Africa, the US and Europe. This has included on the War on Drugs and online rise of President Duterte in the Philippines, livestreaming in China, meme culture in India, and the spread of propaganda and misinformation in Burundi. She has been part of award winning teams for the BBC World Service such as Newshour, World Have Your Say and World Update. She regularly appears on BBC News TV to discuss social media trends. Prior joining the BBC, she spent extensive time working for NGOs in the Great Lakes in Africa.

J. Lester Feder is a senior world correspondent with BuzzFeed News, now based in London focusing on nationalist movements. He has covered human rights issues around the world since joining BuzzFeed News in 2013. In 2015, he was named Journalist of the Year by theNational Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association in the United States for his reporting on fights over LGBT rights from places including the Vatican, Uganda, and the former Soviet Union. Before joining BuzzFeed News, Feder covered the Obama administration and Congress for Politico in Washington.

Dr Joe Mulhall is Senior Researcher at HOPE not hate. Formerly he was a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London where he also he completed his PhD on the postwar far right. He held a Research Assistantship at Harvard University and obtained an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA from the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively (both academically and journalistically) on the international far right and Islamism and discussed his research on the BBC, CNN and Channel 4 news and written for the Guardian and New Statesman among others. He recently co-authored HOPE not hate’s new report The International Alternative Right: From Charlottesville to the Whitehouse. He also sits on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Patrik Hermansson is a researcher of far-right extremism at HOPE not Hate. He has a MSc from LSE and a degree in Political Science from Uppsala University in Sweden. He’s also a contributor to Swedish anti-far-right extremism magazine Expo and recently came out of a one-year infiltration of the international Alternative Right for HOPE not hate, which was featured in a New York Times exclusive and is being made into a documentary film, My Year In Kekistan.

HOPE not hate is a unique type of anti-fascist and anti-extremist organisation. For the past 14 years, they’ve been leading the fight against fascists and extremists internationally – using a potent blend of research, undercover operatives and public engagement to close down the space white supremacists and racists operate in.

Read HOPE not hate’s new report on the alt-right (and alt-light) The International Alternative Right: From Charlottesville to the Whitehouse? which involves Patrik’s undercover work.

In covering stories of women recruited through social media, news outlets often fetishise female terrorists and contribute to stereotypes of radicalised women as femme fatals or individuals who have struggled to integrate into Western culture. Research increasingly suggests they are educated and highly politicised women who seek power and a sense of agency over their lives.

What role does the media play in influencing the decisions female extremists make and how can journalists better cover the issue?

Chaired by Flora Bagenal senior reporter for the Women and Girls Hub by News Deeply.

Speakers:

Nikita Malik is a Senior Researcher at Quilliam, where she heads research on women, children, and families against radicalisation. Nikita has presented findings to EU and UK Parliament, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Department of State (DoS), and the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN). She also heads Fempower”, a pioneering outreach program on gender extremism, providing training workshops to women in local communities, schools, and universities on the issues of honour based violence, forced marriage, FGM, and domestic abuse.

Fatima Zaman is currently delivering Prevent, part of the UK government’s counter terrorism strategy. She coordinates multi-agency efforts to prevent individuals from being drawn into
terrorism. She previously led ministerial policy work relating to counter terrorism. She is also a
global CVE Advocate at the Kofi Annan Foundation, working to counter extremism through peer-to-peer engagement.

Charlie Winter is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. He studies terrorism, insurgency and innovation, with a focus on online and offline strategic communication. He is pursuing a PhD in War Studies at King’s College London, examining the outreach efforts of the Islamic State in a comparative historical context. Winter regularly consults for governments and often appears in international broadcast and print media. He is an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism.

Edit Schlaffer is a social scientist, writer, activist and holds a PhD from the University of Vienna. In 2002 she founded Women without Borders, an international research-based NGO, encouraging women to take the lead in their personal and public lives. Her research and activities focus on women as agents of change and as driving forces to stabilize an insecure world.

Presented in partnership with News Deeply.

Rifkind addressed a full house at the Frontline Club on Monday 21st Novemeber at a discussion about the future of conflict. Rifkind was joined by fellow panellists Paul Rogers, a professor in the department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, Julia Ebner, a Policy Analyist at Quilliam, and Julian E. Barnes from the Wall Street Journal, chaired by Jenny Kleeman, a British film-maker and journalist.

Paul Rogers identified a key issue in current conflict: ‘we’ve entered into an era of a revolution of frustrated expectations globally’, where people’s living standards are not rising with their expectations.

Julia Ebner believes a ‘global jihadist insurgency’ and a ‘far-right renaissance in Western countries’ are provoking a ‘phenomenon of reciprocal radicalisation’, where each party’s actions (such as anti-Muslim hate crimes and fundamentalist terror attacks) feed into the other’s grievances. For Ebner the solution lies in tackling those grievances and in tackling the ‘black-and-white narratives that are propagated from both sides’ which result in a worldview of the West and Islam being at war with each other.

Ebner was particularly concerned by the impact of fake news sites, as well as the echo chambers that are all too prevalent on the social media landscape in what she termed our ‘post-factual society’. Rifkind expressed similar concerns about social media, saying it ‘stimulates extremism, people… wind each other up and they get amplified… it’s hugely problematic in terms of stimulating extreme identities’. Barnes pointed to the ‘explosion of encryption technology and the ability very easily for groups or individuals to get very high-powered encryption that’s very difficult for intelligence services in the UK or the US to break.’

Although all of the panellists agreed that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has failed, Barnes said we should expect to see more of a focus on this under Trump, with Russia as a potential ally. Continuing the war on terror may be playing into the hands of Islamic terrorists who want war: Rogers argued that ‘if they present themselves as the true guardians of Islam under attack by crusader Zionist forces, then essentially it helps to be attacked’.

The panellists emphasised the importance of preventative work against conflict; but how do we get politicians to realise earlier that conflict is not the answer and to act early when politicians’ interests naturally lie in short-term success? Rifkind pointed out that ‘foreign policy is often about crisis management, it’s often about reacting rather than anticipating’, citing the Gaza conflict as a key example of this. Ebner, meanwhile, argued that the solution does not lie in politics at all, but within civil society, where we should ‘tell better stories than extremists are telling’.

IS is funded partly by Western Gulf states, and Barnes wonders if we might expect Trump to cut business from such countries ‘we very much could see more pressure [on allies which are known to fund terrorist groups] on this transactional approach’. However, IS campaigns are relatively cheap to run, and is able to maintain taxation within the territory, so a decline is as likely to come from a lack of appeal. None of this solves the underlying problems of the Arab world that made it so popular (the ‘revolution of frustrated expectations, as Rogers put it), such as unemployment. The underlying problem of marginalisation is here to stay, according to Rogers, who also named climate change as a major cause of future conflict and migration. Ebner added that uniting against climate change ‘could be part of the solution – it could also provide civil society with a common cause, an abstract enemy…rather than human beings fighting against human beings’.

Will World War III be mankind versus climate change? One can only hope.

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East Correspondent for The Independent, has been reporting on the region for over 25 years and has published four books on the recent history of Iraq. His forthcoming book, The Age of Jihad: The Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East, presents a compelling new analysis of the dominant conflict of our time; the Sunni – Shia war and the subsequent origins of Daesh.

Cockburn argues that the rise of Daesh did not explode suddenly in Syria after the Arab Spring as the conventional view holds, but over several years in occupied Iraq. It is in the sectarian conflict that engulfed Iraq following the war of 2003 that patterns were established that would later spill over into Syria with such devastating results.

Patrick Cockburn will join us in conversation with Azadeh Moaveni to discuss in depth the current turmoil in the Middle East and the fraught role the West has played in the region from 2001 to present.

Azadeh Moaveni is a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine. She reported from throughout the region for much of the past decade, and speaks Persian and Arabic. Her books include Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and she is co-author, with Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with reporter Abi Austen, director Will West and producer Shoaib Sharifi.

Reporter Abigail Austen is a former Parachute Regiment officer, the first British army officer to change her gender. Together with director Will West, she returns to the battlefield at the invitation of her former Afghan colleagues. Austen served four years alongside the US Army in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Austen has secured unique and extraordinary access to a turning point in the battle against ISIS and the Taliban across Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and are the first television crew to re-visit Camp Bastion since the British army withdrew. Now the battle’s at a pivotal stage.

Following the end of Coalition combat operations at the close of 2014, Afghans have been leading the fight against ISIS and a resurgent Taliban. In 2015, just one year, the Afghan army has lost ten times more soldiers than the British lost in fifteen years. The Taliban now control over half the country.

Austen and West fly with the helicopters of the Afghan Air Force, crucial to bringing in reinforcements and carrying out the wounded and dead. The bases they fly to are completely surrounded by the Taliban and helicopters are the only way in or out.

Back in Kandahar, Austen visits wounded troops in the military hospital where no western television journalists have ever been allowed access. She finds wards full of severely injured men. In Afghanistan, there’s no pension or Help for Heroes. Many of the wounded are the sole breadwinners for their families.

Austen meets the Head of the Air Wing, General Sherzai, who admits that the military situation is critical. The Unreported World team flies with him to Helmand and visits the site of the former Camp Bastion, now empty and no use to the Afghans despite intense ongoing fighting. On her return to Kandahar, Austen is given bad news. Other towns including Musa Qala have fallen to the Taliban. The news means everything the British fought for in Northern Helmand is now in Taliban hands.

Austen and West join another helicopter mission to Khas Uruzgan, one of the last bases left. It’s completely surrounded by the Taliban, and the fighting is hand-to-hand. As the helicopter lands, the pilot Salim spots a Taliban position above. A battle rages overhead as a few desperate souls try to get on board and take the only way out.

An Afghan army that the West spent billions to create is beginning to fall apart. Kandahar City, the Taliban’s birthplace, is now within their sights. If the Taliban is successful, the Afghan Government is unlikely to survive.

Channel 4, 7.30pm, Friday 9th April
For more information visit: www.channel4.com/unreportedworld http://www.facebook.com/unreportedworld #UnreportedWorld

Directed by: Will West
Reporter: Abi Austen
Producer: Shoaib Sharifi
Runtime: 24′
Country: United Kingdom