November
5, 2004
Rami
Khouri Named First Global Studies Fellow-in-Residence
Rami Khouri will visit MHC November
15–19. He will present a public lecture titled “Iraq and
the Wider American Dilemma in the Middle East” at 7:30 pm on
Tuesday, November 16, in Gamble Auditorium. |
Acclaimed journalist Rami George Khouri will be on the
Mount Holyoke campus from Monday, November 15, to Friday, November 19, as the
campus’s first Global Studies Fellow-in-Residence through the new Center
for Global Initiatives.
Khouri, 55, is executive editor of the Beirut, Lebanon-based Daily
Star newspaper,
published throughout the Middle East with the International
Herald Tribune. A
Palestinian-Jordanian whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth, Khouri
is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, who is
often called on for comment by the U.S. and international media. In recent years
he hosted Encounter, a weekly current affairs talk show on Jordan Television,
and Jordan Ancient Cultures, a weekly archaeology program on Radio Jordan.
“We are very pleased that Rami Khouri will be the first Global Studies
Fellow at the Center for Global Initiatives,” director Eva Paus said. “At
a time when war and volatility in the Middle East threaten both global and national
stability, Khouri brings insightful, knowledgeable, and nondogmatic perspectives
to these issues. His views, too little heard in the United States, present ways
of understanding our current challenges that deserve a wide audience among national
leaders and policymakers. We are delighted to have him in South Hadley.”
“I am honored and delighted to have this opportunity to spend a week on
the Mount Holyoke College campus and look forward to exchanging ideas and perspectives
with students, faculty, and members of the wider Five College community,” Khouri
said. “These are pivotal and often violent days in relations between the
United States and the Arab world, and the trend has worsened in the past few
years. We must use every possible opportunity to reduce the military and diplomatic
tensions between these two regions of the world, and replace them with a more
productive trajectory of cooperation that builds on our many shared values and
common goals of peace, prosperity, democracy, and national dignity. Political
leaderships in both regions have failed miserably to do this, which only raises
the urgency of more honest, fruitful communication among members of civil society,
especially in the mass media, education, and private business. I look forward
very much to taking part in this process in mid-November at Mount Holyoke College.”
Highly influential, Khouri frequently writes on issues tied to the Middle East
and the Arab world. For example, in a September 15 column entitled “The
Hysterical Road from the Sept. 11 Attacks to Fallujah,” Khouri wrote:
“It was not inevitable, but this is how it turned out: Three years after
the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks when Arab terrorists used commercial planes to strike
the United States, the U.S. Army is using its planes to attack individual houses
in Fallujah. For the past five days, American planes have bombed targets in Fallujah,
routinely killing 15, 20 or 30 people at a time. The U.S. Marines carrying out
the attack say they are killing members of the Al-Qaeda-related terror group
headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, while Iraqis on the ground say many of the dead
are civilians, including women and children.
“President George W. Bush argues that Iraq is the front line in the ‘war
against terror.’ If this is true — which most of the world doubts — then
we have two large problems on our hands, and not only the terror problem that
erupted on Sept. 11: the war against terror is not being won, and terrorist networks
and incidents are expanding steadily around the world.”
Khouri spent the 2001–2002 academic year as a Nieman Journalism Fellow
at Harvard University and was appointed a member of the Brookings Institution
Task Force on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. For 18 years he was general
manager of Al Kutba, Publishers, in Amman, Jordan, and in 1999–2002 was
a consultant to the Jordanian tourism ministry on biblical archaeological sites.
He is also a research associate at the Program on the Analysis and Resolution
of Conflict at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, and a Fellow of the Palestinian
Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Jerusalem). He lectures
frequently at conferences and universities throughout the world. Khouri has B.A.
and M.Sc. degrees in political science and mass communications respectively from
Syracuse University.
Khouri will spend the week engaged in a number of activities, including meeting
with students, scholars, and other interested individuals throughout the Five
Colleges. At 7:30 pm on Tuesday, November 16, he will present a public lecture, “Iraq
and the Wider American Dilemma in the Middle East,” at Gamble Auditorium
in the Mount Holyoke College Art Building. The event is free, fully accessible,
and open to the public.
The Center for Global Initiatives was founded in 2004 to unite Mount Holyoke’s
wealth of international programs and people, and implement a coherent vision
for education for global citizenship. The center initiates, promotes, and coordinates
educational activities to advance our understanding of global problems and solutions
from cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-national perspectives. Through
its programs, students and faculty engage critically with the promises and threats
of an increasingly global world.
More information about the center may be found at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/programs/global/index.html.
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