The panel discussion ‘What Does Trump’s Presidency Mean for the Rest of the World?’ on 25 November clearly highlighted this as it careened wildly, swerving from the global implications and election autopsies, to passionate debates over racism and fascism.

Journalist and author Laurie Penny damned the evening as a ‘normalising’ discussion about ‘a fascist’. Echoing this, Shelina Janmohamed (a commentator on Muslim social and religious trends) urged the audience to think about the framing of the stories told. ‘The way we talk about identity,’ she argued, referring to the coverage of the trial of Jo Cox’s murderer, ‘…affects real peoples’ lives’. There is a potential ‘ripple’ effect on women’s rights movements globally, she argued, legitimising misogyny as ‘locker room talk’, disregarding women’s place in society, and signalling that it’s okay to talk about your daughter in ‘repulsive’ ways.

Trump’s rhetoric around climate change has some fearing the death of climate politics. He talks about ‘setting free coal,’ says Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief for the New York Times. But, this won’t go far: ‘No one’s going to invest in coal, it’s not worth their money,’ Erlanger argued. Many countries are ‘invested in a cleaner world’ for their own reasons, so ’just because the president thinks it can happen’ it doesn’t mean it will.

Having previously referred to NATO as ‘obsolete‘, will Trump oversee a shift in the global security landscape? Dan Roberts, The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, argued Europe will be ‘looking after itself’: for Trump, world security isn’t ‘an American problem’. Erlanger demurred, pointing out that the USA’s NATO membership isn’t altruistic, but in American ‘interests’. President of the British International Studies Association, Inderjeet Parmar, agreed, ‘I don’t think America’s retreating’.

Author, broadcaster, and the chair of the event, Michael Goldfarb asked if Trump caught a ‘wave’ that’s sweeping the world. There is a ‘systemic’ element, Parmar mused; the populist surge is the ‘unravelling of an order’ unable to sustain the ‘Western’ dream. But did Trump’s supporters see themselves as part of a larger wave? One audience member disagreed, arguing that many who voted for Trump sought a conservative supreme court, and didn’t consider the ‘world economy’ or ‘globalism’.

To what extent Trump fulfils his campaign promises remains to be seen. ‘The office has a moderating influence’ argued Alex Sundstrom of Republicans Overseas UK, he will ‘tack to the centre to get stuff done’. Janmohamed disagreed, arguing that his appointees are ‘proof that he’s going to make good on those statements.’ Parmar, however, saw compromise ahead. ‘The education of Donald Trump is going to be the title of a really great book,’ he quipped, ‘that education began as soon as his election was through.’

On Friday 19 June 2015, the Frontline Club held a screening of the genre-defying Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, an experimental film focusing on the experiences of those who risk their lives in order to reach the shores of Europe. The audience was joined by co-producer Katja Draaijer for a discussion following the screening.

Producer Katja Draaijer

On the film’s experimental narrative structure, Draaijer said: “It was always clear from the beginning that he [director Morgan Knibbe] wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a ghost. That’s why he used style elements from fiction films.”

“On the news we see all the numbers,” said Draaijer, “but he didn’t want to portray them [the refugees] as victims, but for we as an audience to experience what it is to be a refugee. That’s why he wanted to tell it from the perspective of a refugee himself.”

Asked by an audience member about the myriad languages spoken the film’s protagonists, Draaijer explained:
“Most of the time he [Knibbe] didn’t understand what was said. For the Arabic we had an Arabic translator… What he was really doing was intuitive, just really following them around. He didn’t care, really, about what they were saying. He just wanted to show the people what they do. How they cook, how they live. And that’s what he did. Sometimes he thought, ‘OK I have enough’ and turned the camera away. In the editing we found out that that really worked that way. It wasn’t so much about what they were telling us, [but] more about their experiences at the time.”

An audience member asked what personal impact the filmmaking process had on the director.

“When he started he was only 22,” replied Draaijer. “He wanted to help everyone by giving them money. So that was the first thing I said, ‘Don’t help these people by giving them money, you can help in another way.’

“I think after Lampedusa he was really emotional, for a long time… He wants the whole world to see it.”

For more information about the film and upcoming screenings, visit the Those Who Feel the Fire Burning Facebook page.

In September 2012, the tiny prairie town of Leith, North Dakota, saw its population of 24 grow by one. Trouble had come to town. The newcomer was Craig Cobb, a notorious white supremacist. Quietly snapping up plots of land, he planned to take over the town government and establish Cobbsville, a haven for white separatists. In organising a rally of supremacists and neo-Nazis and courting them to take up residence, Cobb does not endear himself to Leith. Tensions soar as his behaviour becomes increasingly more threatening, and the residents desperately look for ways to expel their unwanted neighbour.

Welcome to Leith is a fascinating and suspenseful story about race, civil liberties and freedom in the United States, playing out in the shadow of the biggest oil boom in North Dakota’s history. Underpinning this stranger-than-fiction documentary is the question of how we wrestle with our democratic principles when they’re pushed to the limit.

Welcome to Leith received the Filmmaker to Filmmaker Award at the 2015 HotDocs International Film Festival.

Directed by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker
Produced by No Weather Productions
Duration: 86′
Year: 2015
www.facebook.com/welcometoleithfilm

"We were attacked by hammers, by screwdrivers, by knives, by clubs with nails," Maajid Nawaz said of the attacks he faced as the teenage son of Pakistani immigrants in Essex, South London, in the early 1990s.

"These were men in their 20s, with shaved heads…it was a sport for them.  They called it ‘Paki-bashing’."    

Nawaz discussed his memoir Radical at the Frontline Club, tracing his path from an angry, hip-hop obsessed teen, to a high-level organizer for the global revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), to a four-year prison term in Egypt, to his co-founding of Quilliam, a London-based think tank that counters Islamist extremism.

"Hip-hop culture was crucial in developing the self-confidence needed to assert oneself," Nawaz remembered.  But it was Islamism that truly gave him community, security, and identity.  An organizer for HT handed him a flyer one day, 

"an articulate, young, trendy, and intelligent man who was studying medicine, from my hometown, who could relate to me and my problems."

Nawaz joined HT, electrified by

"the level of power and seeing results that came immediately as a result of me adopting this identity…  how we managed to face down so many of the conflicts and violence that we were exposed to on the streets of Essex….  Suddenly, we had backup.  Suddenly we were members of this internationally feared and renowned club…the global Muslim community."

Nawaz built HT branches in Britain, Denmark, Egypt and Pakistan. The aim of HT being to reestablish a Muslim caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, whose "armies would protect Muslims across the world just as the American army protects American citizens."

After 9/11 he was imprisoned in Egypt and there he experienced a change in thinking, coming to believe that Islam as a faith had nothing to do with the political project of Islamism. Islamism, he came to feel,

"was a stifling, totalitarian, victimhood ideology that prevented independent thought, and all it ever did was breed more extremism, more discrimination, more racism, and more division."

At Quilliam, Nawaz seeks to address the grievances of Muslims and to reverse radicalisation by taking on the arguments of Islamism and countering them.

Nawaz does not agree with the line of thought from the right or the left. The left, he says, must challenge the injustice not only of racism but of Islamism as well. The right, he says, must show care for Muslims’ grievances at the hands of  racism and Western foreign policy. 

Muslims, meanwhile, must question their own narrative.  Nawaz explained,

"sadly…the victimhood narrative has become popular.  And it’s part of the story, but it’s not the whole story."

He put particular focus on Muslims’ ideological narrative, without which,

"the 7/7 bombers wouldn’t have said, in their thick Yorkshire accents by the way, that your people have attacked my people.  Here’s a British Pakistani talking about the Iraqis as his people, in a Yorkshire accent…  So the recalibration of identity…is what I call the ideological narrative […]

What we’re trying to do [is] engage the young, angry British Muslims with counter-narratives. Those young angry Muslims aren’t engaged in faith […] They’re people like me who weren’t particularly religious, and then get politiciised. […]

Crucially, Nawaz emphasized that the title of his book, Radical, doesn’t refer to his days spreading Islamism.  "[It’s] describing me now," he said.

"I’m trying to reclaim the word, and to say that what’s truly radical in majority Muslim societies is to advocate democratic culture on the grass roots.  [If that] can be entrenched…  then we can secure the future, the democratic future."

Watch the full video here:

Video streaming by Ustream

On 10 February 2005 BBC journalist Kate Peyton was murdered in Mogadishu, Somalia. For several days afterwards, her death dominated the international press. But within less than a week Kate Peyton’s name was out of the headlines and almost forgotten;  just another tragic victim of the journalistic struggle to report from the world’s battlegrounds.

Kate Peyton’s younger sister Rebecca Peyton will be at the Frontline Club to perform her one-woman show, directed by Martin M Bartelt, which invites us into her post-Kate world: Rebecca’s life goes on, changed forever, but it goes on.

A story about politics, journalists and death, told through the eyes of Rebecca. It features racism, press freedom and human rights, and introduces the new etiquette which consists of discussing death at dinner parties, suffering at soirees and grief at gatherings.