Speaker biographies

Ammar Abdulhamid is a visiting fellow at the Project on U.S. Policy toward the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Abdulhamid, a novelist and social analyst, is co-director of DarEmar, a publishing house and nongovernmental organization based in Damascus, Syria. He directs DarEmar’s Tharwa Project, a regional program addressing the needs of religious and ethnic minorities, and is a founding member of the Euro-Arab Platform for Justice and Democracy. His current research focuses on the challenges facing the new generation of Arab intellectuals.

Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, a lawyer and outspoken proponent of reform, is the leader of the Progressive Democratic Party in Tunisia.

Shafeeq Ghabra is chairman and CEO of Alghad Communication/Leadership and Policy Institute. He was the founding president of the American University of Kuwait and a professor of political science. Dr. Ghabra is the former director of the Center of Strategic and Future Studies at Kuwait University and the Kuwait Information Office in Washington, D.C. From 1996 to 1999 he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Sciences at Kuwait University. Dr. Ghabra writes weekly columns on political affairs for Kuwait’s daily Al Ra'y Al A'am, Lebanon’s daily al Balad, and is a frequent contributor to Alhayat daily and the Daily Star. Dr. Ghabra has been a visiting professor of political science at several U.S. colleges and universities and is a frequent lecturer on topics including Islam and the West, liberalism, Kuwait, Iraq, Arabian Gulf security and political issues, democratization in the Arab world, the Middle East peace process, Islamic affairs, and Arab-Western relations. He is a long-time advocate of democratic reform in the Middle East. A veteran of the public affairs arena, Dr. Ghabra has participated in interviews and debates on American, European, Canadian, Kuwaiti, and other Arab television and radio broadcast programs. The author of four books and scores of articles and papers, Dr. Ghabra has received Kuwait's highest award for scientific research in the Humanities and Social Sciences from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, chaired by the emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al Ahmed al Sabah. His book Palestinians in Kuwait: The Family and the Politics of Survival was named by Choice magazine as Outstanding Academic Book of 1989. His other books include Israel and the Arabs: From the Conflict of Issues to the Peace of Interests (Arabic, 1997) and Kuwait: A Study of the Dynamics of State and Society (Arabic, 1995).

Sama Hadad is the spokeswoman for the Iraqi Prospect Organization, a pro-democracy group based in Baghdad. She is also a fellow at the newly established Baghdad Institute for Public Policy Research, where she studies Shi’i political theory, security, and Iraqi international relations.

Hassan Mneimneh is the director of the documentation project for the Iraq Memory Foundation and co-director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University. He is a regular contributor to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat. His publications include “Manual for a ‘Raid’” (co-authored with Kanan Makiya in The New York Review of Books). He also works on Lebanese political reform.

Jamil Nimri is the writer of a daily column of Amman’s Al-Ghad newspaper. From 2003 to 2004 he was producer and anchor of The Dialogue Triangle, a political dialogue program on Jordan Television. From 2000 to 2001 he was producer and anchor of Jordan Television’s Agenda, and from 1996 to 1997 he was a regular participant on Pens and Opinions, a journalism program. From 2001 to 2005 he was the author of a daily political column in Al-Arab Al-Yom, and from 1996 to 2000 he was a regular contributor to the newspaper’s political and economic analysis sections. From 1991 to 1993 he was chief editor of the weekly Al-Ahali. He was also a writer of political analysis in the weekly Al-Hilal. Mr. Nimri is a member of the Higher Council for Media in Jordan and president of the Jordanian Organization for Democratic Culture as well as the General Council of the Democratic Left Party. Mr. Nimri has contributed to workshops and presented papers on issues relating to politics and media. His research focuses on media, parliamentary elections, and democratic change in Jordan. His specialty is in the organization of electoral systems.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East (including Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. While at AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, a project on democracy for the Arab world, a roundtable of experts to discuss global energy security, and a project to develop bilateral relations between India and the United States. She recently served as a member of the congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations, established by the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to AEI, she served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Ms. Pletka has also been a journalist based in Washington, D.C. and the Middle East.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Between 2002 and 2004, Mr. Rubin worked as a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He previously lectured in history at Yale University, Hebrew University, and three different universities in northern Iraq. Mr. Rubin is the co-author (with Patrick Clawson) of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, 2005), and the author of Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Palgrave, 2001).

Najat Sharafeddine has been a news editor and anchor at Future Television, Beirut, Lebanon, since 1993, where she conducts interviews with political guests on a regular basis. In the aftermath of Prime Minister Hariri’s assassination last February, Najat began a new TV program that she edits and presents, hosting such prime guests as Walid Junblat and Shiekh Naeem Kasem. She has worked as a journalist and op-ed contributor to a number of newspapers and magazines. She also worked as a correspondent, presenting live field coverage of the Afghan war in 2001 and the Iraq war in 2003, among numerous other important events. She has interviewed several international figures, including then–Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi. She has lectured at many conferences and roundtables in Lebanon, Amman, Tunis, Rabat, Berlin, and London, among others, speaking on subjects such as the image of Islam in the West, the Middle East political situation, Arab women’s issues, and the role and importance of the media.

Lokman Slim was born in Beirut in 1962, where he lived until moving to France in 1982. He returned to Beirut in 1988. Two years later, he founded Dar al Jadeed publishing house, which publishes Arabic literature and essays of controversial content. Its publications range from books banned by the Lebanese General Security to the first Arabic translations of the writings of Muhammad Khatami, the former Iranian reformist president, which generated controversy within the Shia community in Lebanon. In 2001 he widened his scope of intervention to include film, with the establishment of Umam Productions, which has produced several films, including Massaker, which was co-directed by Slim and won the Fipresci Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Massaker has been screened at over fifteen festivals worldwide, from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa. In 2004, he cofounded Umam Documentation and Research (D&R), a nonprofit organization devoted to creating an open archive of materials concerning Lebanon’s social and political history, as well as organizing film screenings, art exhibitions, and discussions relating to civil violence and war memory. Umam D&R is based in Beirut’s southern suburb, the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik, where it acts as a counter to the cultural monopoly and extremism on its own turf. Slim believes ground is gained one square foot at a time. His latest project is Hayya Bina (Arabic for “Let’s Go!”), a political pressure group which began its activities during the 2005 parliamentary elections in Lebanon with the aim of promoting accountability, civil rights, and democratic values. Several of his articles, essays, and translations have been published in Arabic newspapers and books.