Khalil Jahshan has been serving as Executive Director of Arab Center Washington DC (ACW) since its inception in 2014.

Between 2004 and 2013, Jahshan was a lecturer in International Studies and Languages at Pepperdine University and Executive Director of Pepperdine’s Seaver College Washington DC Internship Program. Previously, Jahshan served as Executive Vice President of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Director of its government affairs affiliate, NAAA-ADC. Throughout his career he has held numerous positions, including Vice President of the American Committee on Jerusalem, President of the National Association of Arab-Americans, and National Director of the Association of Arab-American University graduates. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and French from Harding University in 1972.

Mr. Jahshan has served on the board of directors and advisory boards of various Middle East-oriented groups including ANERA, MIFTAH and Search for Common Ground. He has appeared on various media outlets such as Al-Jazeera, Al-Hurra, CCTV, Al-Arabiya, C-SPAN, and Charlie Rose.

Internationally acclaimed author and media critic Dr. Jack G. Shaheen is a committed internationalist and a devoted humanist. His lectures and writings illustrate that damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of Arabs, blacks, and others injure innocent people. He defines crude caricatures, explains why they persist, and provides workable solutions to help shatter misconceptions.

Dr. Shaheen, a distinguished visiting scholar at New York University (NYU), served as a CBS News Consultant on Middle East Affairs from 1993-98. As a professional film consultant, he has consulted with writers and producers such as writer-director Stephen Gaghan on Syriana (2005), and producer Chuck Roven on Three Kings (1999), as well as with Coca-Cola’s creative team. He is a 2013 recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, which pays homage to those individuals who have distinguished themselves in the cultural mosaic of America.

Shaheen has given more than 1,000 lectures in nearly all 50 states and on three continents. In cooperation with the U.S. government, Dr. Shaheen has conducted seminars throughout the Middle East. He also consulted with the United Nations, the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and New York City’s Commission on Civil Rights.

Shaheen’s book, A is for Arab: Archiving Stereotypes in U.S. Popular Culture, features telling photographs of materials from the Jack G. Shaheen Archive at NYU. His book and a special traveling exhibit documents U.S. popular culture representations of Arabs and Muslims from the early 20th century to the present. NYU’s Shaheen Archive contains more than 4,000 images, including motion pictures, cartoons,and TV programs, as well as toys and games featuring anti-Arab and anti-Muslim depictions.

His other books are: Nuclear War Films, The TV Arab, Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture, the award-winning book [and DVD] Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, and GUILTY: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. His writings include 300-plus essays in publications such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, as well as dozens of chapters on stereotypes in numerous college textbooks.

Dr. Shaheen, an Oxford Research Scholar, is the recipient of two Fulbright teaching awards; he holds degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Missouri. He has appeared on national network programs such as CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Nightline, Good Morning America, 48 Hours, and The Today Show.

Tom Hayes, Lecturer in the Film Division at Ohio University, originally hails from Vermont. At the age of 15 he won the Kentucky Educational Television Young Peoples Film Competition. He worked his way through film school in the 70’s crewing on cargo ships, and working as a drive-in projectionist. Working as media freelance on commercial productions enabled him to pursue his independent documentary projects. Hayes’s first long form documentary focused on the experience of Cambodian refugees, from their lives in a refugee camp on the Cambodian border, through their first year of resettlement in the U.S. That film, Refugee Road, was broadcast nationwide on PBS.

In the early eighties his interest turned from the Cambodian refugee experience to the odd situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Weathering the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and ongoing civil strife, he produced Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile, narrated by Martin Sheen. Once faced with the realities of the Palestinian experience, Hayes became engaged with the issue and continued documenting the human and political rights situation of this human community for decades. The Independent Television Service funded his film, People and The Land, about the role of the United States during the first Palestinian Intifadah. His latest film, Two Blue Lines, integrates footage Hayes began gathering in 1983, up to the present.

Jim Moran is a former U.S. Representative for Virginia's 8th congressional district in Northern Virginia, including the cities of Falls Church and Alexandria, all of Arlington County, and a portion of Fairfax County. Moran served from 1991 to 2015, and is a member of the Democratic Party. While in congress, Moran was a staunch critic of moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the major role the Israel lobby played in pushing for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Moran was the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia from 1985 to 1990, when he resigned to run for Congress. He defeated Republican incumbent Stanford Parris in the general election on November 6, 1990, and was sworn in the following January. He is of Irish descent, and is the son of professional football player James Moran Sr. and the brother of former Democratic Party of Virginia Chairman Brian Moran. Moran announced on January 15, 2014, that he would retire from Congress at the end of his term. Moran is currently a professor of practice in the School of Public and International Affairs in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech.

Former Congressman Nick Joe Rahall II, a grandson of Lebanese immigrants, represented West Virginia in the U.S. Congress from 1977 to 2015. When he was elected, the 27-year-old became the youngest member of Congress.

Rahall was one of only 8 House members to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq in 2002 that preceded the Iraq War.

Rahall has repeatedly expressed concern about America’s relationship with Israel, stating, “Israel can’t continue to occupy, humiliate and destroy the dreams and spirits of the Palestinian people and continue to call itself a democratic state.” He has affirmed that America’s interests would be served by getting the peace process back on track, and regretted the U.S. vetoes of U.N. resolutions against Israeli settlement building.

The Congressman pressed the State Department to end a ban on travel to Lebanon until the ban was finally lifted in 1997. Rahall also expressed concern over a bipartisan resolution supporting Israel in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict without adding language urging restraint against civilian targets. Rahall helped draft a resolution that urged “all parties to protect innocent life and civilian infrastructure.”

Maria LaHood is a Deputy Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, with expertise in constitutional rights and international human rights. She works to defend the constitutional rights of Palestinian human rights advocates in the United States in cases such as Davis v. Cox, defending Olympia Food Co-op board members for boycotting Israeli goods; Salaita v. Kennedy,representing Steven Salaita, who was terminated from a tenured position for tweets critical of Israel; and CCR v. DOD, seeking U.S. government records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding Israel’s 2010 attack on the flotilla to Gaza. She works closely with Palestine Legal to support students and others whose speech is being suppressed for their Palestine advocacy around the country. She also works on the Right to Heal initiative with Iraqi civil society and Iraq Veterans seeking accountability for the lasting health effects of the Iraq war. Her past work at CCR includes cases against United States officials, Arar v. Ashcroft, Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, and Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta; against foreign government officials, Matar v. Dichter and Belhas v. Ya’alon; and against corporations, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch/Shell and Corrie v. Caterpillar. Prior to coming to the Center for Constitutional Rights she advocated on behalf of affordable housing and civil rights in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. She was named a 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Finalist.

Grant Smith is the director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). He is the author of the 2016 book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America about the history, functions and activities of Israel affinity organizations in America. Smith has written two unofficial histories about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). America's Defense Line: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government and Foreign Agents: AIPAC from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal.

Smith's reports about the Israel lobby appear frequently in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Antiwar.com news website.

Catherine Jordan is the award-winning producer and co-editor of Valentino’s Ghost: Why We Hate Arabs. A journalist for 14 years, she spent five years working with director Michael Singh to shape the film’s structure, narrative and aesthetics, as well as researching the storylines and current events which form the narrative thread for their documentary. Jordan was an editor and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, and a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in London, The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Magazine, Condé Nast’s Tatler (London) and The New Scotsman (UK). She spent three years as a researcher at Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures studio, where her work included research and writing on the genres and highlights in Paramount’s theatrical library of 2,500 films. Jordan was honored at the MPAC 2014 Media Awards as a “Voice of Courage and Conscience” for her role in producing Valentino's Ghost.

Philip Weiss is an American journalist who co-edits Mondoweiss, a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective. Weiss has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and the New York Observer. In 2006 he began writing a daily blog called Mondoweiss on The New York Observer website. In the spring of 2007 he started Mondoweiss as an independent blog because of 9/11, Iraq, Gaza, the Nakba and the struggling people of Israel and Palestine, with the aim of building a diverse community, with posts from many authors. He co-edited The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (2011) with Adam Horowitz and Lizzy Ratner.