The Hard Conversation

LITOPIA AFTER DARK is back! And in typical style, our first guest for the new season spent four nights in a freezing cave in Tora Bora interviewing none other than Osama bin Laden. How’s that for openers?

But that’s far from Abdel Bari Atwan’s only claim to fame.

Born in Gaza, he is one of the world’s leading authorities on al-Qa’ida. Indeed, he wrote the definite book on the subject – The Secret History of al-Qa’ida.

At a moment when the West seems poised for yet more intervention in a deeply unstable Middle East, this is just the right time to hear from an author, editor and journalist who knows the region, and its peoples, intimately.

Bari is a regular guest on the BBC, Dateline, CNN and Al Jazeera. He has 740,000 twitter followers. His Rai Al Youn digital newspaper-- often called the Huffington Post of the Arab World-- boasts a circulation of almost half a million.

He also spent four nights in a freezing cave in Tora Bora interviewing Osama bin Laden.

And yet, no one seems to like Bari . He's outspoken on Israel being the enemy of the Arab world-- yet he advocates for a one state solution to the Palestinian crisis. He's blacklisted in Egypt and other Arab nations for cozying up to the infidel West, yet the state of Israel prevented him from returning to his native Palestine to visit his dying mother-- or go to her funeral. He can't even get a visa to visit the good ol' USA.

Tonight he joins us to solve the Middle East crisis in 140 characters or less. He also shares his impassioned opinions on everything from drone strikes to the Alabama legal system to women's rights in the Arab World.

Bari's new book is entitled Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate.

>>>>>>

Download the show as an audio file
Subscribe in iTunes