Author Talk: Akbar Shahid Ahmed with Will Bunch

Mavey Books and CAIR-Philadelphia are pleased to welcome Akbar Shahid Ahmed for the release of his book, Crossing the Red Line.
About this Event

Mavey Books and CAIR-Philadelphia are pleased to welcome Akbar Shahid Ahmed for the release of his book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, November 13, 2026. This event will be held at Haraz Coffee House 1822 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19103.

Free to attend. Books are available for purchase and signing at the event. Any books pre-purchased for the author talk will be available for pickup at the event.

In Crossing the Red Line, Ahmed details how the Biden administration fueled Israel’s genocide in Gaza, despite the president assuring the American public he’d set a “red line” over an Israeli invasion in the town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering. But Biden’s team kept sending weapons after Israel’s advance on Rafah began, deepening Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe.

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

Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the diplomatic correspondent at The Washington Sun. 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.

Will Bunch is the national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including sharing a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for New York Newsday on a deadly subway crash at Union Square in Manhattan. Bunch has written several books on politics, including “Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy” and “The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama.”

Free to attend. This event is sponsored by the Main Line Jewish Justice Collective. Books are available for purchase and signing at the event. Any books pre-purchased for the author talk will be available for pickup at the event.