We will be discussing the "War on Terror" that was waged in the wake of 9/11, the impact of a global battle characterised in terms of "good vs. evil": and asking if it is a war that can ever be won. What has been the impact of both the reality and rhetoric on an increasingly interconnected world? The panel will also be taking stock of the seismic events the world has witnessed in the past decade.
Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House who was living and working in New York on 9/11 and anchored the New York end of the special programme that night for BBC One. Twitter: @paddy_o_c
With:
Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former Channel 4 news and current affairs editor, co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader and author of the new ebook The Debt Delusion. Twitter:@ns_mehdihasan
Carne Ross, a former British diplomat, author and journalist. Having resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret testimony to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, he then set up the world’first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises marginalised countries and groups around the world. He is author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century. Twitter: @carneross
Maajid Nawaz, co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and founder of Khudi, and Founder of Khudi, he was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). During his 14 years with HT he was a founding member of its Denmark and Pakistan operations. During a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison he renounced Islamist ideology while remaining Muslim. He now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, social-activism, writing, debating and media appearances. Twitter:@MaajidNawaz
Michael Goldfarb, author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent. Goldfarb has covered conflicts and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Middle East and Latin America for NPR and the BBC. He covered the war in Iraq as an unembedded reporter based in Kurdistan. His book on the conflict, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named one of The New York Times‘ Notable Books of 2005. On September 11, 2001 he was live on the air from 10 until noon in the US presenting part of NPR’s coverage and since then has reported extensively on radical Islam from Cairo and Tehran to the streets of London. Twitter: @MGEmancipation
Book tickets here.
]]>
Issa Saharkhiz talks about the difficulties of working as a journalist in Tehran to NPR. Or in his case, of not working. Saharkhiz tells NPR that every paper he’s ever worked on has been closed. Most recently, the Iranian authorities closed two popular publications he ran; the Daily Economic News and a monthly magazine called Aftab,
“I worked for almost 10 papers during the last eight years. Unfortunately, all of them were closed by the court or the government. Two years ago, they sent me to … court” link
Photo taken by Mike Shuster/NPR
]]>
Soraya Sarhadd Nelson, a reporter with NPR, found out the only way to get to a story about the judiciary in Afghanistan was to don a burqa and head into Kunar province. Even then, things didn’t go smoothly,
“Put on your burqa and don’t speak English. They can’t know you are
American or we’ll all be dead,” Momand warned me as we left Kabul in
his well traveled Toyota Corolla. (I speak Dari, one of Afghanistan’s
languages).In Jalalabad, a fairly safe Afghan city near the
Pakistani border, the plan quickly fell apart. The Afghan businessman,
it turns out, had other things on his mind besides arranging my
interview.While Momand went to repair his car, the businessman
took me to a tiny hotel room where I was to stay the night. The
businessman told me Momand could not accompany us to the room because
he’d gotten the room for his “wife.”Pashtun culture bars any man from being in the same room with a woman not closely related to him.
But
the businessman would not leave. He kept asking me personal questions.
He repeatedly told me to take off my burqa and sit next to him on the
cushions on the floor. When he finally left the room to get some tea, I
grabbed my cell phone and called my fixer in Kabul for help. He called
Momand. link
Image by Roohullah Anwari for NPR
]]>