Speaker biographies
Mohammed Ali is an Iraqi blogger and civil society activist. He started the blog Iraq the Model in late 2003 and won the Weblog Award in both 2004 and 2005 for the best blog in the Middle East/Africa category. He is the cofounder and program manager of Friends of Democracy, an Iraqi civil society organization that supports democratic change and freedom of speech in Iraq and the broader Middle East. In 2007, PC World magazine named him one of the fifty most important people on the Web. Mr. Ali has published articles in several Iraqi, European, and American newspapers and magazines.
Tony Badran is a research fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he focuses on Lebanon and Syria. He researches and writes on political developments and the democratic movement in Lebanon and the opposition in Syria. Mr. Badran is the author of the respected blog Across the Bay, on which he reports and comments on political developments affecting Lebanon and Syria. Additionally, he is the editor of the Syria Opposition Portal, a website at which he tracks news from within Syrian opposition movements. His writing is also featured on FDD’s blog. Born and raised in Lebanon, Mr. Badran’s educational background is in religion and Semitic linguistics.
Hassan Mneimneh is the executive director of the Iraq Foundation and director of documentation projects for the Iraq Memory Foundation, a Baghdad-based project that seeks to catalogue and document the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He was previously codirector of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University. He is a regular contributor to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat. His articles have appeared in, among other outlets, The New York Review of Books.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar in foreign policy studies at AEI, where he researches Arab democracy; Kurdish society; and domestic politics in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Prior to joining AEI, he served as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from 2003 to 2004. Previously, he was a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during 2002–2004. He is currently the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. He blogs at The Corner on National Review Online.
Arash Sigarchi is a freelance journalist and blogger born in northern Iran. He started his career in journalism at the age of sixteen. In 2000, he became the editor-in-chief of the Iranian daily Gilan Emrooz (Gilan Today); during his five-year editorship, the publication was twice voted the best local paper at the Iranian press festival. In January 2005, he was imprisoned by Iranian security forces and sentenced to fourteen years in prison--although an appeals court later commuted the sentence to three years--for publishing censored material in Gilan Emrooz and on his personal blog. In January 2007, he was diagnosed with cancer and was granted a medical furlough from prison to seek treatment. Mr. Sigarchi was the 2007 recipient of Human Rights Watch’s prestigious Hellman/Hammett grant, awarded annually to writers who have been victims of political persecution.
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