Forty-one-year-old Radwan Ziadeh’s résumé is enough to make a Washington overachiever blush, notes Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the Pen American Center and former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the U.S. State Department. He has published more than 20 books. He founded and directed institutions including the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies and helped establish the Syria Relief Network, the largest coalition of Syrian humanitarian groups. ….. Ziadeh was a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, she writes for Foreign Policy:
A denial of Ziadeh’s asylum claim — based on the absurd finding that he has engaged in terrorism — makes so little sense that it would be comforting to expect that the Arlington Asylum Office’s preliminary decision, to which Ziadeh’s pro bono attorneys have filed an objection, will be abandoned. But that commonsense outcome is hardly assured. It thus falls to Ziadeh’s many friends and colleagues, to proponents of conflict resolution and peace-building work, and to principled members of Congress to undo this miscarriage of justice.
