Raed Jarrar

Raed Jarrar is a Palestinian Arab-American architect, blogger, and political advocate based in the U.S. Capital Washington, DC.

Life Jarrar was born in Iraq, and raised in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He is half Iraqi and half Palestinian. He holds a degree in architecture from the University of Baghdad, and a master's degree in Architectural Engineering, specialized in post-war reconstruction, from the University of Jordan.

While attending the University of Baghdad, he met the fellow architecture student later known as Salam Pax.

Jarrar first gained prominence as the person referenced in the title of the blog "Where is Raed?", written and maintained by Salam Pax, to which Jarrar himself made infrequent posts. This blog received widespread media coverage during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and afterwards. By 2017, Jarrar was Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International, United States. That year, he was denied entry by Israel to mourn his recently deceased father, in his father's hometown of Jenin. In 2020 Jarrar became advocacy director at DAWN.

JetBlue incident Jarrar's T-shirt slogan, "we will not be silent" in Arabic and English. Jarrar later gained attention after an incident on August 12, 2006 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Raed had attempted to board a JetBlue flight from New York City to Oakland, California while wearing a black T-shirt with the text "We will not be silent" in English and Arabic. The shirts were produced by The Critical Voice, an anti-war group; the text was inspired by the German phrase Wir schweigen nicht ("We will not be silent"), the slogan of the White Rose, the "subversive" German antifascist anti-Nazi organization. As Jarrar himself related:

"So I went to the airport in the morning, and I was prevented to go to my airplane by four officers, because I was wearing this t-shirt that says 'We Will Not Be Silent' in both Arabic and English. And I was told by one of the officials that wearing a t-shirt with Arabic script in an airport now is like going to a bank with a t-shirt that reads, 'I am a robber'."

After a lengthy exchange with airport staff, Jarrar was persuaded to cover his T-shirt with another T-shirt bought for him by JetBlue staff from an airport gift shop. In January 2009 JetBlue paid Jarrar $240,000 to settle the case.

Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, an expert in Constitutional law at the American Civil Liberties Union who followed the trial, noted: "neither the TSA officials involved nor JetBlue could identify a single passenger who had supposedly been 'concerned' by Mr. Jarrar's t-shirt. Nor had they inquired whether the nature of any purported 'concern' was based on a legitimate reason or an illegitimate racial bias, perhaps grounded in the stereotyping of Mr. Jarrar as a "terrorist" simply because he is Arab and wore a shirt with Arabic script."