Joseph Braude and the Washington Moroccan American Club Presents "The Making of the 'The Honored Dead,' by Joseph Braude" Conference-Lunch

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Police in North Africa and the Middle East have a troubling history of human rights abuse and corruption, and their inner workings are opaque.  But in 2008, one Arab government granted a Western journalist unprecedented access to its security services, and the outcome of his reporting offers gritty insights into the changes now underway throughout the Arab world.

Journalist Joseph Braude, a fluent Arabic speaker of Iraqi Jewish descent, was embedded for four months in Casablanca with the Moroccan "Judiciary Police" – a plainclothes investigative unit roughly akin to the FBI.  He was permitted to witness night raids into a vast shantytown, oversee interrogations and investigative procedure, and review sensitive case files.  One particular file on a recent homicide piqued his curiosity.  The victim was a shadowy Berber migrant with links to a radical cleric.  The killer was an Arab soldier in a new urban unit of the Moroccan army.  The crime scene was a warehouse owned by a wealthy member of the Moroccan Jewish community, the last Jewish community of any size in the Arab world.  Braude befriended the victim's family and friends, who believed that police were concealing details about the crime from the public and from him.  Outside the precinct walls, he collaborated with the victim's best friend to launch an independent investigation into the affair.  His experience is narrated in The Honored Dead: A Story of Friendship, Murder, and the Search for Truth in the Arab World (Random House – Spiegel & Grau, 2011).  The Washington Post has called the book "an ingenious, moving, respectful, and ultimately honest book about Morocco and its people."

You are cordially invited to join Mr. Braude for a discussion of "The Honored Dead"

Where: National Press Building
529  14  St., Washington, DC
Room: First Amendment Lounge  - 13 Floor  

When: September 15th, 2011
From Noon to 2pm

Contact and media registration
Mohammed El Hajjam 703-271-0088 or [email protected]
L'houssaine Oulbaz 202-290-9352  or [email protected]

A light lunch will be served

Biography
Born to an Iraqi-Jewish family in Providence, Rhode Island, Joseph Braude studied Near Eastern Languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. He is fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, and has lived, studied, and worked in most Middle Eastern capitals.  His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, Glamour, and Best Life.  Since July 2010, his weekly commentary in Arabic, “Letter from New York” (“Risalat New York”) has aired nationally in Morocco on Radio MED. He is also the author of The New Iraq (Basic Books, 2003). In his spare time, Braude plays jazz piano and enjoys running and yoga.

SOURCE Washington Moroccan American Club