2012 Celebrity Judges for "Dream Deferred Essay Contest"

 

Amber Lyon
Amber Lyon is a three-time Emmy award-winning journalist and correspondent for CNN, where she helps produce investigative reports and documentaries. She covered the Bahraini nonviolent movement on the ground, and was attacked by Bahraini police. Since then she has become one of the most cited American journalists on the struggle for civil rights in Bahrain.

Ahmed Benchemsi
Benchemsi co-founded Morocco's groundbreaking and best-selling weekly magazines TelQuel and Nichane, which made international headlines with taboo-busting cover stories on the salary of Morocco's king, opinion polls, free speech and more. Benchemsi has been recognized for his pioneering journalism with fellowships at the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. At the same time, he faced on-going legal intimidation and recently left Morocco to serve as a fellow at Stanford University.

Marietje Schaake
Marietje Schaake is a Dutch politician who has served as a member of the European Parliament since July 2009. The Wall Street Journal identified her as “The Most Wired Politician in Europe”. She has introduced numerous resolutions and inquiries to support the civil rights movement in the Mideast and North Africa before and after the Arab uprisings.

Parisa Montazaran
Parisa Montazaran is the first Muslim to appear on the MTV hit show The Real World. A first-generation Iranian-American, 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. Parisa hopes to leverage her freedom in the US to promote change back home in Iran.

Jane Novak
Jane Novak is a leading player in the Yemeni struggle for reform, press freedom, and women equality - and she does it all from her New Jersey home. This stay-at-home mother first became interested in Yemen in 2004 when she learned about the imprisonment of journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani. Novak began to publicize his case on her blog and launched a petition calling for al-Khaiwani’s release. The petition soon garnered 1,000 signatures, and Novak was profiled in the New York Times.

Nasser Weddady
The son of an ambassador, Weddady grew up throughout the Middle East and witnessed firsthand the toll of civil rights repression. As an adult he became an outspoken human rights activist and had to flee to the US as a refugee in 2000. A few days after September 11, he was mistakenly detained by the FBI. Today, he organizes workshops for Middle Eastern activists and helps lead campaigns to free dissidents. He is the co-editor of "Arab Spring Dreams," a new anthology featuring outstanding writing from this essay contest.

Previous Celebrity Judges

Zainab Al-Suwaij
Al-Suwaij is the co-founder of the American Islamic Congress (AIC). Granddaughter of Basra’s leading cleric, she 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 organizes human rights and women’s rights conferences throughout the Middle East.

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.

 

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.

Khaled Abol Naga
Khaled Abol Naga is a famous Egyptian actor and television personality. In 2000, he was selected to host “Good Morning Egypt”, one of the most widely known television programs in the country. He left the show in 2001 to pursue his acting career and has since won 8 Best Actor awards, being recognized in his home country as well as film festivals around the world. Naga made his American debut in the movie Civic Duty (2006). He is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Egypt.

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.

Mona Eltahawy
Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and a public speaker. Born in Egypt and now based in New York, she regularly published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Jerusalem Report, Qatar’s Al Arab newspaper, and beyond. She has won the Samir Kassir Prize and the Anna Lindh Journalism Award for her reporting.

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 has been profiled in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Rana Husseini
Husseini is a Jordanian reporter who one day decided to cover an “honor killing.” Shocked by the case, she decided to launch an international campaign to break the silence on “crimes of honor.” Her memoir “Murder in the Name of Honor” (featuring a foreword by Jane Fonda) recounts the story of her awakening. She contributed to AIC’s recent report “A Modern Narrative for Muslim Women in the Middle East.”

Dr. Saad 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.

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.

Ahmed Ahmed
Ahmed, an Egyptian-American actor and comedian, currently stars in the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, which features Middle Eastern stand-up comics. He has been profiled in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and TIME Magazine. Ahmed can be seen in a PBS documentary, “Stand Up” and has appeared in many TV shows and movies including JAG, Rosanne, MTV’s Punk’d, Iron Man,and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. He is a regular performer at The Comedy Store in Hollywood and has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Middle East.

Sohrab Ahmari
Growing up in Tehran, Ahmari was interrogated by security officials as child about his parents and faced disciplinary action for bringing a Star Wars video to school. As a teenager, he left for Utah and became an American. While studying for a law degree, Ahmari has also emerged as a leading young pundit on human rights reform in the Middle East, writing for the Boston Globe, Guardian, Huffington Post,and PBS. He is the co-editor of "Arab Spring Dreams," the new anthology of outstanding essays from the Dream Deferred Essay Contest.

Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani
Al-Khaiwani is a leading Yemeni editor who has been repeatedly jailed for his independent journalism. Al-Khaiwani was released from prison in September after an international solidarity campaign successfully pressured the Yemeni regime to overturn his conviction for allegedly “insulting the president.” Earlier this year he received a top human rights award from Amnesty International and his case was featured in the New York Times.

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 assisted 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.

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.

 

Wayne Smith
Wayne Smith is civil liberties program manager for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. 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.

Dean Obeidallah
Award-winning Palestinian-American comedian Obeidallah was once a practicing attorney. Part of the legendary “Axis of Evil” special from Comedy Central and Showtime Arabia, he is the Executive Director of the groundbreaking Amman Stand-Up Comedy Festival. He regularly performs comedy shows throughout the Middle East, including in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Israel.

If you have a question, email us at essay@aicongress.org.