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| Celebrity Judges for "Dream Deferred Essay Contest" |
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Dr. Azar
Nafisi
 Nafisi is author of the best-seller Reading
Lolita in Tehran and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. While teaching English literature at Tehran University during the Iranian
revolution, she and her students faced civil rights restrictions. In 1995, Nafisi quit her university position and
invited seven of her female students to attend weekly meetings in
her home to discuss literature. Nafisi moved to the
US and in 2003 published her memoir, which explores
the transformative power of fiction under tyranny. Reading
Lolita in Tehran spent over 100 weeks on the bestseller
list and been translated into 32 languages. Nafisi lectures on civil rights issues and advises international
human rights organizations.
Ammar Abdulhamid
 Abdulhamid
is a Syrian poet, novelist, and activist. Son of legendary actress Muna
Wassef, Abdulhamid attended university in the US and became an Islamist
imam. The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie shook his
radicalism, and he returned to Syria to work on civil rights
projects. He is a co-founder of the Tharwa Project,
an initiative on minority rights in the Mideast and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He blogs at Amarji.blogspot.com
and has been profiled in the Washington
Post and New
York Times.
Zainab Al-Suwaij
 Al-Suwaij
is the co-founder of the American
Islamic Congress. Part of an established Iraqi religious family,
Al-Suwaij grew up under Saddam Hussein's rule. In high school, she
refused pressure to join the Ba'ath Party and began writing poetry
as an outlet from repression. She participated in
the failed 1991 uprising against Hussein and fled to the US. After the
September 11 attacks, she co-founded the AIC to promote tolerance and civil
rights in the US and in the Muslim world. She has published in the New
York Times, appeared ABC’s 20/20,
and met with the President. She collaborates with the genocide
education project Facing
History and organizes human rights conferences in Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt.
 Ahmed
Benchemsi
Benchemsi edits the acclaimed Moroccan weekly magazine Tel Quel,
which made international headlines with a cover
story on the salary of Morocco's king. Tel Quel has addressed many taboos in
Moroccan society (e.g., an
expose on Morocco's security
services), and Benchemsi has been recognized for his groundbreaking
journalism with fellowships at the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. At the same time, he has faced numerous lawsuits and legal intimidation from the government. He is currently on trial over an editorial he published in his new Arabic magazine Nichane.
 Parisa Montazaran
Parisa Montazaran is the first Muslim character to appear on MTV hit show The Real World. A first-generation Iranian-American, Parisa is interested in international law, with a focus on human rights and cross-cultural exchange between the US and the Middle East. This reality TV star is currently lecturing at universities on diversity, Muslim youth in America, cross-cultural and inter-faith understanding, and female/minority empowerment. She hopes to leverage her freedom in the US to promote change back home in Iran. She is also pursuing her life-long dream of singing and recording an album.
 Wayne Smith
Wayne Smith is civil liberties program manager for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and a long-time international civil rights advocate. A combat medic in Vietnam, Smith worked as a psychotherapist for combat veterans and was active with Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. He is past president of the Black Patriots Foundation and former executive director of The Justice Project. He has appeared on Nightline, CBS News, and National Public Radio, and is featured in the book “American Patriots.”
 Dr.
Tom Palmer
Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and
director of Cato
University. During the 1980s, he helped support freedom and classical liberal ideas in
Eastern Europe under Communism: smuggling books, photocopiers, and
fax machines from an office in Austria and leading seminars for young activists. He now works with
Middle Eastern intellectuals to promote reform in the Arab world.
Palmer helped launch the "Lamp
of Liberty" website
of writings on liberty in Arabic, and he has lectured in Jordan, Iraq,
Egypt, Morocco, and Oman. He blogs at tomgpalmer.com.
Celebrity Judges from 2006 and 2007
Gloria
Steinem
 Steinem
has been called "America's most influential, eloquent, and revered
feminist" and is the founder of Ms. magazine. Early
in her career she struggled to find work as a journalist because
editors wanted to hire only male reporters. She
co-founded the National
Women's Political Caucus and the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
She has been inducted into the National
Women's Hall of Fame, and is the author of Revolution
from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, a bestseller that has been translated into 11 languages. She is also co-founder of the Greenstone Media women's radio project.
 Dr. Rola Dashti
An independent entrepreneur, Dashti chairs the Kuwaiti Economic Society and was among the first women ever to run as a candidate for Parliament in Kuwait. In March of 2005, she led successful protests demanding women's suffrage in Kuwait. She has also worked with the International Red Cross in Lebanon; demanded information on hundreds of Kuwaitis taken as prisoners during the Gulf War; and spurred grassroots activism among women in rural villages in Tunisia and Yemen. An Arabic transcription of one of Dashti’s speeches on women’s participation in politics can be found here.
 Lily Mazahery, Esq.
Mazahery is a Persian-American attorney and founder the Legal Rights Institute. Her efforts to save the lives of women on “death row” in Iran (for example: "Save Nazanin", "Save Ashraf", and "Save Malak") have received worldwide media attention, and several cases have been overturned as a result of her campaigns. Mazahery provides expert commentary on Iranian law, as well as human rights violations across the Middle East. She has testified before the U.S. Congress on the atrocities committed against women in Iran by the ruling regime, including public stoning, and denial of child custody rights. She also assists the Iran Freedom Concert.
 Dr. Shafeeq Ghabra
Ghabra is the past president of the American University of Kuwait, an institution he helped launch. A Palestinian-Kuwaiti, he currently leads the Jussor Arabiyya Center for Leadership and writes a column for newspapers in Kuwait, Lebanon, and the UAE (for example, on authoritarian government in the region and the culture of violence in Iraq), as well as the webportal Misbahalhurriyya.org. Ghabra is regularly interviewed by media sources such as NPR, PBS, and CNN. He is also author of "Palestinians in Kuwait: The Family and the Politics of Survival."
 Mahmood
Al-Yousif
Al-Yousif is the godfather of the blogging scene in
Bahrain. His blog, Mahmood's
Den, has inspired dozens of young people in the Persian Gulf
region to begin blogging. His blog receives over 1.6
million hits each month from around the world. Although some
Bahraini bloggers have been arrested for posts to their weblogs,
Mahmood remains outspoken. Indeed, the opening of his blog defiantly
reads: "I'm NOT registering this site with the Bahraini government."
Al-Yousif runs a hi-tech company in Bahrain and is also an avid photographer.
 Roya
Hakakian
Writer and journalist, Roya Hakakian,
was only 12 years old when she was swept up by the 1979 revolution in
Iran. By 1984, when the egalitarian promises of the revolution had been
betrayed, Roya's
family, members of Iran's ancient Jewish community, emigrated to the
US. Roya's career spans from serving as a contributor to and editor of
Persian-language magazines in diaspora, to producing news shows for ABC
News, and CBS's 60 Minutes, to documentaries for UNICEF. She is a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, and a founding member of the Iran Human Rights
Documentation Center. Roya is the author of two books of
poetry in Persian. Her acclaimed memoir, Journey
From the Land of No (Crown, 2004), was Elle
Magazine's best nonfiction book of the year.
Dr.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
 Ibrahim is the Middle East's most
prominent human rights activist. His first brush with fame came as a
teenager, when he won an essay contest on the life of Gamal Abdel
Nasser, then the president of Egypt. Today he is chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for
Development Studies, an institute dedicated to promoting
civil society in Egypt and the Arab world. In 2000, the Egyptian regime
threw him in jail, locked up the Ibn Khaldoun Center,
delivered a rushed guilty verdict, and sentenced Ibrahim to seven years
of hard labor. After Ibrahim's
case received international attention, he was eventually
released and acquitted in 2003.
Abdel
Nasser Ould Yessa
 Yessa is
co-founder of the Mauritanian organization S.O.S. Slaves,
which was banned by the Mauritanian regime since its founding in 1995
until 2005. A member of his country’s Arab-Berber elite, he
grew up surrounded by black slaves, who had served his family for
generations. As a teenager, however, he discovered the 1789 Declaration
of the Rights of Man. Article I – “All men are born
free and equal” – upended
Yessa’s world and compelled him to join the
struggle against slavery, racism, and dictatorship. Although the Mauritanian
regime once issued an arrest warrant against him, Yessa
continues his struggle, advocating against
violence in the Arab-Muslim world and working in partnership with other
Middle Eastern and North African reformers.
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