Crossing the Red Line

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The Middle East Policy Forum will host award-winning foreign affairs journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, author of Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza, on Wednesday, October 28. In a discussion moderated by Professor Marc Lynch, Ahmed will offer his powerful and authoritative account of how the Biden administration fueled atrocities in Gaza.

In vivid prose and with unparalleled access to insiders, Ahmed depicts a White House that resisted a course correction as its failures became undeniable. He probes Biden’s inner circle,  whose choices fueled tens of thousands of avoidable deaths among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis, torpedoed long-time standards for warfare, and created a more dangerous world for us all. The Biden administration’s decisions drove voter backlash that helped Donald Trump regain power, and established patterns of impunity that have spurred wider bloodshed under Trump.

Crossing the Red Line is an urgent reckoning with Biden’s record on Gaza that is vital to understanding historic damage to America’s standing in the world, and a period whose dark consequences will resonate globally for decades to come.

We hope you will join the Middle East Policy Forum to hear from Akbar Shahid Ahmed about his new book. This event is open to the general public and media. Copies of Crossing the Red Line will be available for purchase at the event.

Speakers:

• Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the diplomatic correspondent at NOTUS. For his Gaza coverage, he has received a Writers Guild Award and a New York Press Club Award and has twice been named a finalist for the Livingston Award. Based in Washington, D.C., Ahmed previously covered foreign policy at HuffPost for twelve years. He is a Yale graduate who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan.

• Dr. Marc Lynch received his B.A. in Political Science from Duke University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics and international relations. Professor Lynch is also the founding director of the Project on Middle East Political Science and co-director of the Program on African Social Research, editor of the book series Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics, and associate editor of The Monkey Cage political science blog. His recent books include: The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research After the Arab Uprisings (edited with Sean Yom and Jillian Schwedler); The New Arab Wars: Anarchy and Uprising in the Middle East; The Arab Uprising: Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East; The Arab Uprisings Explained, and Voices of the New Arab Public; and America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region (Hurst Publishers/Oxford University Press).