Rami Khouri
Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
Contact:
Email: rami.khouri@dailystar.com.lb
Experience
Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
He 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 US Relations with the Islamic World. He is a research associate at the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University (NY, USA), a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Jerusalem), and a member of the Leadership Council of the Harvard University Divinity School. He also serves on the board of the East-West Institute, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University (USA), and the Jordan National Museum.
He was executive editor of the Daily Star newspaper in 2003–2005, and before that had been editor-in-chief of the Jordan Times for seven years, when he also wrote for many years from Amman, Jordan for leading international publications, including the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. For 18 years he was general manager of Al Kutba, Publishers, in Amman, and in recent years served as a consultant to the Jordanian tourism ministry on biblical archaeological sites. He has hosted programs on archaeology, history, and current public affairs on Jordan Television and Radio Jordan. He often comments on Mideast issues in the international media and lectures frequently at conferences and universities throughout the world.
He has BA and MSc degrees respectively in political science and mass communications from Syracuse University
May 9, 2008
"Breakfast in Beirut"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
This was the third time in a generation that I lived through armed conflict in Beirut, including the early months of the civil war in 1975, the war with Israel in summer 2006, and now this battle -- both a local test of political strength and a proxy battle for the wider ideological war pitting United States-led, predominantly Sunni Muslim Arabs vs. Iranian- and Syrian-led, heavily Shiite Muslim Arabs. The regional and global confrontation translated this week into who controlled a few buildings and streets in West Beirut.
May 6, 2008
"The Global Food and Energy Crises and the Middle East"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
Things will be much more difficult this time around. The consequences could be much worse, especially in view of the ripple effect of the war in Iraq, Iran's growing influence, continued stalemate in Palestine, and the weakening of some Arab governments. It is difficult to predict exactly what will happen in the years ahead, but the stressful factors pushing change are already clear and we would be foolish to ignore them.
May 5, 2008
"Linus Pauling Still Teaches Courage"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
Any scientist -- even political scientists and politicians -- should be able to hear and understand the cries for a more orderly, safe and just society that emanate from throughout the Middle East. Many of the preconceived ideas or simplistic impressions about Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims that prevail in the United States and other Western countries are not derived from careful observation of facts.
April 29, 2008
"Washington Cedes its Role"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
It is telling of the damage the United States has done to its influence in the Middle East that the potentially most important diplomatic development in the past generation -- a possible Israeli-Syrian treaty -- seems to be taking place without any significant American role.
April 28, 2008
"As Northern Ireland, So the Middle East"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
There may be important parallels today between the IRA cease-fire in 1994 and Hamas' offer of a mutual, not a unilateral, truce. Israel and its friends would seem sensible to respond to Hamas by testing its sincerity about shifting from armed resistance to political negotiation, through a carefully calibrated and negotiated series of steps that simultaneously gives both sides important gains.
April 23, 2008
"Two Causes of Arab Political Incoherence"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
How much are the Arabs responsible for their own political dysfunction, national fragmentation and rampant violence, and how much of their troubles can be blamed on foreign interference and military interventions in the region? Two recent articles in quality American journals highlight how low-class Arab politics that are widely dissatisfying to their own citizens can reflect both indigenous autocracy and foreign mischief-making.
AP Photo
April 21, 2008
"The US Democracy Gap in the Arab World"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
One of the paradoxes of the complex relationship between the Arab World and the United States relates to the rhetoric and reality of democratic values. The George W. Bush administration has made democracy promotion a central pillar of its foreign policy in the Middle East at the level of rhetoric, but in practice it pays little heed to behaving democratically in its interaction with the Arab people.
AP Photo
April 15, 2008
"Two Arab Worlds Drift Further Apart"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
As oil prices and income to some Arab producers continue to rise, we can witness sharper polarization between the wealthy energy-producing, small population states of the Gulf, on the one hand, and the more populous, energy-importing Arab countries all around it in the Levant region, the Nile Valley, and further west into North Africa. Any person who travels to such places as Dubai, Doha, Bahrain, Amman, Cairo, Casablanca and Beirut moves between two very different worlds that are united by investment and labor flows but are being pushed further apart in most other spheres of life.
eremi
April 11, 2008
"Understanding Hamas' Six R's"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
Israel, the United States, and some other countries reject dealing with Hamas because they see it purely as a terrorist organization dedicated to the "destruction of Israel." The reality is more complex than that. Hamas certainly has committed acts of terror against Israeli civilians, and it must be held accountable for such deeds -- in a context in which all who commit murder and terror in the Middle East are similarly held accountable, including Israelis, Arabs, Iranians, Americans and British.
April 9, 2008
"A Disturbingly Juvenile View of Islam"
Op-Ed, Agence Global
By Rami Khouri, Dubai Initiative Senior Fellow, Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and Editor-at-Large of the Daily Star
The United States is a confused and frustrated country when it comes to dealing with the wide variety of voices and actions coming out of Islamic societies. Everywhere in the public sphere, discussions of foreign policy issues inevitably touch on how to deal with "Islamic extremism," often revolving around the "terrorism" and "violence" of Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran, Muqtada Sadr and other such parties that the United States dislikes.
The debate on these issues in the United States is disturbingly juvenile. I have rarely if ever heard discussions in this country about ordinary, normal, non-violent Arabs and Muslims who make up 99 percent of their societies. Only the intemperate and militant in the Arab/Islamic world are seen and discussed in America.
