Zalmay Khalilzad.
Khalilzad, a native of Afghanistan, is the current United States ambassador to Iraq. He previously served as United States ambassador to Afghanistan. In February of 2007, Khalilzad was nominated by President George W. Bush to the post of United States ambassador to the United Nations, a post vacated by John Bolton. During most of the 1990’s, Khalilzad worked at the RAND Corporation, helping to establish the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In 1998, the ambassador participated in and signed “The Project for the New American Century,” a think-tank and organization forwarding a “neo-conservative” foreign policy agenda. Other signatories included Richard Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
Azar Nafisi
Nafisi is an author, academic, and activist of Iranian heritage best known for her work Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi, whose father was a former mayor of Tehran, attended secondary school in Britain. She returned to Iran for college and later as an academic. She left the nation in 1997 for the United States, where she wrote Reading Lolita . . . about a women’s experiences living under an Islamic Republic. Nafisi is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. He bestsellers have been translated into over 30 languages.
Keith Ellison
Ellison is a freshman member of the United States House of Representatives from the Fifth District of Minnesota (Minneapolis and vicinity). A member of the DFL, Ellison is the first muslim member of Congress. Ellison, an African-American, was raised a Roman Catholic and later converted to Islam during the civil rights movement. Before his election to the Minnesota legislature in 2002, Ellison was a practicing civil rights and criminal defense lawyer. The Congressman stirred up controversy in 2007 when he used Thomas Jefferson’s Koran to take his oath of office. Ellison serves on the House Judiciary Committee.
Mohamed ElBaradei
ElBaradei, of Egyptian descent, is the current Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, an UN-backed intergovernmental watch-dog group. ElBaradei has worked in the UN and the IAEA for nearly three decades, garnering some controversy from the current Bush administration of his handling of the nuclear build-up in Iran. ElBaradei and the IAEA received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for their “efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” ElBaradei has been reaffirmed to his third term as the head of the IAEA after the Bush administration dropped its objection to the reelection in 2006.
Zinedine Zidane
Zidane is a French soccer star made infamous by his head blow-to-the-chest to Italian player Marco Materazzi in the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final in Berlin, Germany. Zidane, of Algerian descent holds dual-citizenship between Algeria and France. Zidane emerged on the world soccer scene in 1998, when he scored two goals against Brazil in the 1998 FIFA World Cup Final in Saint-Denis, France. Zidane’s poor choice in the 2006 led to a red-card ejection and to an Italian victory. Zidane, an attacking-midfielder, retired from Real Madrid and the French national team in 2006.
