Amira Hass
Born	(1956-06-28) 28 June 1956 (age 55) Jerusalem[1]
Nationality	Israeli
Alma mater	Hebrew University
Occupation	Journalist
Years active	1989 - present
Employer	Ha'aretz
Known for	Coverage of daily life in Palestinian territories

Amira Hass (Hebrew: עמירה הס‎; born 28 June 1956) is a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist and author, mostly known for her columns in the daily newspaper Ha'aretz. She is particularly recognized for her reporting on Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, where she has also lived for a number of years.

Life[link]

The daughter of two Holocaust survivors,^[2] Hass is the only child of a Sarajevo-born Jewish mother, who survived nine months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a Romanian-born Jewish father.^[3] Hass was born in Jerusalem, and was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the history of Nazism and the European Left's relation to the Holocaust. Early in her career, she traveled widely and worked in several different jobs.

For some years during the 1980's, Hass lived in Amsterdam, being married to a Dutchman. She spoke fluenct Dutch and was involved with various Left-wing, Feminist and Jewish dissident groups. However, her marriage broke down and she returned to Israel.

Until 1989, Hass wrote occasionally for low-circulation left-wing magazines, but was not known to the general public. Her journalistic career was launched due to the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Ha'aretz looked urgently for a reporter to go to Romania and cover the unfolding events. Amira Hass had a cultural Romanian background and some knowlege of the language, and was willing to take the assignment at very short notice. Her series of in-depth reports from Romania got wide attention and gained her a job as a regular staff editor for Ha'aretz.

Frustrated by the events of the First Intifada and by what she considered their inadequate coverage in the Israeli media, she started to report from the Palestinian territories in 1991. As of 2003, she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist who has lived full-time among the Palestinians, in Gaza from 1993 and in Ramallah from 1997. On various occasions she state4d her opinion that "Just as reporting about England should be from London and about France from Paris, so reporting about Palestine should be from Palestine".

Hass was the recipient of the World Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute in 2000,^[4] the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award in 2002, the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 2003, the inaugural award from the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund in 2004 and Hrant Dink Memorial Award in 2009.^[5]

Her reporting is generally sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view and critical of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinians. During the years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, however, Hass published several highly critical articles about the chaos and disorder caused by militias associated with the Fatah party of Yasser Arafat and the bloody war between Palestinian factions in Nablus.

Her reportage of events, and her voicing of opinions that run counter to both official Israeli and Palestinian positions has exposed Hass to verbal attacks, and opposition from both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities. Recently she compared Israeli policies towards the Palestinian population to those of South Africa during Apartheid, saying:

'The Palestinians, as a people, are divided into subgroups, something which is reminiscent also of South Africa under apartheid rule'^[6]

In June 2001, Judge Rachel Shalev-Gartel of the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ruled that Hass had defamed the Jewish settler community of Beit Hadassah in Hebron, and ordered her to pay 250,000 shekels (about $60,000) in damages. Hass had reported Palestinian eyewitness accounts of Israeli settlers defiling the body of a Palestinian militant killed by Israeli police; the settlers argued that the event did not take place, and said that Hass reported the story with malicious intent. The Jerusalem Post asserts that Hass's story was contradicted by television reports. The presiding judge found in favour of the settlers, and said that the report damaged the community’s reputation. Ha'aretz indicated that it did not have time to arrange a defense in the case, and announced that it would appeal the decision.^[7] Hass noted that she had brought forward sourced information from the Palestinian community, and said that it was the responsibility of newspaper editors to cross-reference it with other information from the IDF and the settler community.^[8]

On 1 December 2008, Hass, who had traveled to Gaza aboard a protest vessel, was arrested by Israeli police on her return to Israel for being in Gaza without a permit.^[9]

After residing in the Gaza Strip for several months, Hass was again arrested by Israeli police upon her return to Israel on 12 May 2009 "for violating a law which forbids residence in an enemy state."^[10]

Awards[link]

On 27 June 2001, Hass received the Golden Dove of Peace Prize awarded by the Rome-based organization Archivo Disarmo.^[11]

On 20 October 2009, Hass received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.^[12]

In December 2009 she was awarded the Reporters Without Borders Prize for Press Freedom "for her independent and outspoken reporting from the Gaza Strip for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz during Operation Cast Lead, the offensive which Israel waged against the territory from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009."^[13]

Books[link]

• Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (Owl Books, 2000) ISBN 0-8050-5740-4
• (with Rachel Leah Jones) Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land (Semiotext(e), 2003) ISBN 1-58435-019-9
• Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944-1945 (Haymarket Books, 2009) ISBN 978-1-931859-87-5 ... a new English language translation of her Sephardi Yugoslav mother Hanna Levy-Hass' 1946 memoir, with addition of Hass' fore- and after-words.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Amira Hass

• Interview by Robert Fisk (2001)
• Interview by US National Public Radio (RealAudio, 2001).
• Interview by Democracy Now (RealAudio, MP3, and transcript, 2005)
• Speech at University of Wisconsin-Madison: "Reporting the Middle East" (.mp3) (Fall 2003)
• Anna Lindh prize
• Press Freedom Hero award
• Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award
• World Press Freedom Prize
• Anna Lindh Award
• Amira Hass at the Internet Movie Database
• Video: Amira Hass - From Occupation to Enclosure: Fragmenting the Palestinian State (Part 2) (22 April 2006)
• International Women’s Media Foundation Honors Hass with 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award - video report by Democracy Now!
• Video: Amira Hass Asks Obama to Imagine Life as A Palestinian Under Occupation
• After U.S. Praise for Netanyahu’s "Restraint", Israeli Journalist Amira Hass Asks Obama to Imagine Life as A Palestinian Under Occupation - report by Democracy Now! (7 July 2010)

Rizwan "Riz" Khan (Urdu: ريز خان; born April 1962) is a British^[1] television news reporter and interviewer who until April 2011 hosted his own eponymous television show on Al Jazeera English. He first rose to prominence while working for the BBC and CNN.

Life and career[link]

Khan was born in Aden, South Yemen,^[1] to a Punjabi father^[2] and Gujarati mother. His father's roots are in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, while his mother's roots go back to Kutch, Gujarat. He considers himself a British Pakistani. Khan moved with his family to London, at the age of four. He attended both Springwell Junior and Hounslow Manor Comprehensive Schools and joined the Air Training Corps, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Medical Physiology from the University of Wales, and then completed a postgraduate course in Radio Journalism at the University of Portsmouth.

In 1987 he was selected for the BBC News Trainee scheme - a two-year BBC training system, usually taking only 6 people per course. Khan progressed to jobs as a BBC reporter, producer, and writer, working in both television and radio, and would later become one of the founding News Presenters on BBC World Service Television News. He hosted the news bulletin that launched BBC World Service Television News in 1991. In 1993, he moved to CNN International, where he became a senior anchor for the network's global news shows. Events he covered included the 1996 and 1999 coverage of elections in India; the 1997 historic election in Britain; and in April 1998 the unprecedented live coverage from the Muslim pilgrimage, the Hajj.

In 1996 he launched his interactive interview show CNN: Q&A with Riz Khan, and he has conducted interviews with guests including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, and genomic scientist J. Craig Venter. Khan also secured the world exclusive with Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf following his coup in October 1999. Khan also hosted Q&A-Asia with Riz Khan. These interactive shows put world newsmakers and celebrities up for viewer questions live by phone, e-mail, video-mail and fax, along with questions and comments taken from the real-time chatroom that opens half-an-hour before each show.

Until April 2011, Khan had his own show, Riz Khan, on Al Jazeera English, in which he interviewed analysts and policy-makers and invited viewers to interact with them via phone, email, SMS messages or fax.^[3]

Khan speaks Urdu and Hindi^[4] and also understands other South Asian languages such as Punjabi and Kutchi. He has studied French, and can understand some other European languages, including Swedish and Norwegian.^{[citation needed]}

In 2005 he authored his first book, Al-Waleed: Businessman Billionaire Prince, published by Harper Collins.

In 2011 he authored a preface for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) annual report "Attacks on the Press 2010",^[5] which examined working conditions for journalists in more than 100 countries.^[6]

References[link]

• "Why I'm Joining Al Jazeera", op-ed by Riz Khan, The Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2005, p. A1
• "Q&A CNN Anchor: Riz Khan". India Today. February 19, 2001.

External links[link]

• Riz Khan's official website
• Profile at Al Jazeera English^{[dead link]}
• MySpace Profile
• Interview with Baron Dave Romm of KFAI-FM at the Republican National Convention Sept. 2, 2008 and picture

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Eqbal Ahmad (1933/34 - May 11, 1999) was a Pakistani writer, journalist, and anti-war activist. He was strongly critical of the Middle East strategy of the United States as well as what he saw as the "twin curse" of nationalism and religious fanaticism in such countries as Pakistan.

Life[link]

Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in the Indian state of Bihar. When he was a young boy, his father was murdered over a land dispute in his presence. During the partition of India in 1947, he and his older brothers migrated to Pakistan.

Ahmad graduated from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1951 with a degree in economics. After serving briefly as an army officer, he enrolled at Occidental College in California in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, he studied political science and Middle Eastern history at Princeton University, later earning his Ph.D.

From 1960 to 1963, Ahmad lived in North Africa, working primarily in Algeria, where he joined the National Liberation Front and worked with Frantz Fanon.^[1] He was offered an opportunity to join the first independent Algerian government and refused in favor of life as an independent intellectual.

When he returned to the United States, Ahmad taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1964–65) and Cornell University in the school of Labour Relations (1965–68). During these years, he became known as one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia. From 1968 to 1972, he was a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago.

In 1971, Ahmad was indicted with the anti-war Catholic priests Philip Berrigan and his brother Daniel, along with four other Catholic pacifists, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. After fifty-nine hours of deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial, in 1972.

From 1972 to 1982, Ahmad was Senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. From 1973 to 1975, he served as the first director of its overseas affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

In 1982, Ahmad joined the faculty at Hampshire College, a very progressive school, which was the first college in the nation to divest from South Africa, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he taught world politics and political science.

In the early 1990s, Ahmad was granted a parcel of land in Pakistan by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's government to build an independent, alternative university, named Khaldunia.

Upon his retirement from Hampshire in 1997, he settled permanently in Pakistan, where he continued to write a weekly column, for Dawn, Pakistan's oldest English-language newspaper. Eqbal died in Islamabad in 1999 of heart failure following an operation for colon cancer.

Ahmad was the founding chancellor of the then newly established Textile Institute of Pakistan, a textile oriented science, design and business degree awarding institute. The institute actively claims to be driven by the very values Ahmad stood for and awards its most prestigious honor, the Dr. Eqbal Ahmed Achievement Award to one graduate unanimously deemed by the faculty as reflective of Ahmad's values at its annual convocation.

Since his death, a memorial lecture series has been established at Hampshire in his honor. Speakers have included in Kofi Annan, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy.

Ahmad was admired as "an intellectual unintimidated by power or authority", and collaborated with such left-wing journalists and activists as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Richard Falk, Fredric Jameson, Alexander Cockburn and Daniel Berrigan.

Quote[link]

[Ahmad was] perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of the post-war world, especially in the dynamics between the West and the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa. — Edward Said

See also[link]

• List of Pakistani journalists

References[link]

• Confronting Empire (with David Barsamian),, 2000, South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-615-1.
• The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad edited by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo & Yogesh Chandrani, 2006, Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-12711-1
• Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (with David Barsamian), 2001, Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1-58322-490-4

References[link]

External links[link]

• Website dedicated to Eqbal Ahmad
• Eqbal Ahmad Archive
• Profile on the Transnational Institute
• Eqbal Ahmad, by Edward W. Said, in The Guardian, May 14, 1999
• Noam Chomsky delivers the 2005 Eqbal Ahmad Lecture at Hampshire College
• The Eqbal Ahmad page
• Dawn article by Eqbal Ahmad - 'In a Land Without Music'
• Terrorism: Ours and theirs by Eqbal Ahmad, LiP Magazine: 2001.
• Ahmad, Eqbal. "A jihad against time." Al-Ahram Weekly On-line. 4 February 1999. Al-Ahram. 6 June 2006.
• Obituary. "Eqbal Ahmad, historian and rebel." The Economist. May 27, 1999. This is a link to a premium content article.

Gilbert Achcar (born 1951 in Senegal) is a Lebanese academic, writer, socialist and antiwar activist. He lived in Lebanon until moving to France in 1983. He taught politics and international relations at the University of Paris VIII until 2003, when he took up a position at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin. Since August 2007, Achcar has been Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

He is a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, ZNet, and International Viewpoint.

Gilbert Achcar is a Fellow at the International Institute for Research and Education.

In March 2011, he wrote an article for ZNet that provoked a wide debate within the international left on the position towards the coalition intervention in Libya for humanitarian reasons. [1]

Bibliography[link]

• Author: La nouvelle Guerre froide : le monde après le Kosovo, 1999. English translation included as two chapters in Tariq Ali (ed.): "Masters of the Universe". NATO’s Balkan Crusade, 2000".
• Editor: The Legacy of Ernest Mandel, 1999.
• Author: Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror, 2004 (L'Orient incandescent : le Moyen-Orient au miroir marxiste, 2003.
• Author The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (Le choc des barbaries : terrorismes et désordre mondial, 2002 and 2006.
• Editor: The Israeli Dilemma: A Debate between Two Left-Wing Jews. Letters between Marcel Liebman and Ralph Miliband (Le dilemme israélien. Un débat entre Juifs de gauche), 2006.
• Author with Michel Warschawski: The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and its Consequences, 2007.
• Author with Noam Chomsky, Perilous Power. The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2007 and 2008.
• Author: The Arabs and the Holocaust, 2010.

Sources[link]

• http://www.selvesandothers.org/view423.html
• http://www.vanguardbooks.com/cgi-local/vbl/titlebrowse.pl?isbn=0863569196&subject=Vanguard%20Imports

External links[link]

• Profile at School of Oriental and African Studies
• Interview with State of Nature (March 2006)
• Interview with the Alternative Information Center, "American, Israeli and Iranian Strategies in the Middle East Conflict" (May 2008)
• "Gilbert Achcar on the Middle East"
• Interview with Gilbert Achcar: "The U.S. is sowing the seeds of a long term tragedy..."
• "The Arabs and the Holocaust": War of Narratives
• "Whither Egypt?"

Erika S.L "Kika" Markham (born 1940)^[1] is an English actress.

Markham was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire.^[1] She is a daughter of actor David Markham and writer Olive Dehn (1914–2007). She has led a long career in the cinema, television, and theatre as an actress. Among her television appearances are roles in Minder, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, Van der Valk, Cracker, and Agatha Christie's Poirot.

Kika Markham married actor Corin Redgrave in Wandsworth, London in 1985.^[1] The couple had two sons, Harvey (born 1979) and Arden (born 1983).^[2][3][4] Markham and Redgrave appeared together twice on screen: firstly in Lynda La Plante's Trial and Retribution (2000) as a judge and barrister respectively; and later in the BBC's Waking The Dead (episode "Special Relationship: Part 1") as lovers suspected of the murder of a government advisor. Her sisters are the actress Petra Markham, the poet and dramatist Jehane Markham, wife of actor Roger Lloyd-Pack, and Sonia.^{[citation needed]}

References[link]

External links[link]

• Kika Markham at the Internet Movie Database

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