Across the Arabic-speaking world, those who want to follow the news out of the Middle East are watching news stations such as Al Arabiya and Al Hadath.
To help explain those events, those stations often turn to one particular analyst.
That analyst, speaking in the fluent Arabic of a native speaker, is not in Beirut or Cairo or Riyadh or even in some European capital.
Around much of the world, Professor Ramadan is now known as a key commentator on Middle Eastern affairs generally and the war in Iran in particular. We know him as David Ramadan, a former two-term Republican member of the House of Delegates from Loudoun County who often conducts his global interviews from a weekend home in Franklin County.
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Early one April afternoon in 1983, David Ramadan was at school in Beirut when everything shook with a loud boom. A suicide bomber had just driven a van packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives into the front of the American embassy. “We’re in class and we ran to the windows and saw the building collapse,” Ramadan recalls.
He was 13.
That October the young Ramadan heard and felt another large blast. This one came early one Sunday morning. “I remember running out in pajamas and sandals,” he says. This time it was the suicide bombing of the barracks of the U.S. Marines who were in Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force the West dispatched during the Lebanese Civil War. The attack killed 241 Marines. It was the highest single-day death toll for U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima during World War II and the worst single-day death toll for the U.S. military overall since the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Moments later, a second suicide bomber drove into the French barracks nearby, killing 58 French paratroopers and six civilians.
The twin attacks eventually prompted the withdrawal of the peacekeeping force, and the civil war continued for another seven years. More immediately, the teenage boy who had witnessed both bombings went to school and started asking questions, such as, “Why are Marines being killed?”
In the course of learning more, “I fell in love with the idea of America,” he says. Six years later, at the age of 19, he turned the love of that idea into reality. “We had $3,000 to our name as a family,” Ramadan says. “I told Dad, ‘I need to get out of here or I will die.’ I bought a ticket with $1,000 and had $2,000 left.”
That’s what he arrived in the United States with. (His entire family came later.)
Ramadan arrived in 1989. Three years later, a presidential campaign was underway: the 1992 contest between Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. One of the first things Ramadan did was to volunteer for the Bush campaign.
“I had a heavy accent,” he says. “They said, ‘You can lick envelopes, don’t answer the phone.’” So he licked envelopes, lots of them. As his English improved, “I grew up to answer the phones and do events,” Ramadan says. “I spent 20-some years in Northern Virginia volunteering for every Republican campaign at the time. I spent 20 years helping everybody run for office” — until it came time for Ramadan to become a candidate himself.
We’re skipping over a lot of Ramadan’s biography: He went to college, earned a bachelor’ s degree in government and politics and a master’s degree in international trade. He became an American citizen. He got married — to a “Southern belle” from Franklin County, as he describes her, which explains why he now has a place at Smith Mountain Lake. He began teaching part time at George Mason University, a key detail we’ll return to shortly. His whole family wound up immigrating to the United States. He became a consultant and an entrepreneur, running a consulting firm and multiple businesses. “I had restaurants, I had a jewelry business, I had Curves for Women franchises.”
In 2011, Ramadan decided it was time to stop being a campaign volunteer and start being the candidate. He ran for a seat in the House of Delegates from Loudoun County — and won. At the time, the race was the most expensive House election the state had ever seen. Together the two candidates spent more than $800,000, more than $600,000 for Ramadan’s campaign. “Now the last delegate race in west Loudoun County cost $3 million — absurd,” Ramadan says. In any case, Ramadan won — narrowly, back in the days when Northern Virginia still sent Republicans to Richmond. He became the first adult immigrant to serve in the General Assembly, he says. There had been other legislators who had immigrated as children, but not as adults.
Ramadan served two terms, then moved on so he could pursue a doctoral degree, which he obtained from Vanderbilt University. Remember that part-time teaching at George Mason?
In the early 2000s, he went to the dean with an idea.
“We’re teaching history classes, we’re teaching political science classes,” Ramadan says, but when students pick up a newspaper — those were the days when students might actually be familiar with a printed newspaper — “they have no clue what’s happening.”
The dean asked him: “What do you suggest?”
“I said they need to teach reality. They need a class on Mideast reality. He said, ‘When do you start?’” That’s how Ramadan began teaching a class called “The Realities in the Middle East.”
And that’s how Ramadan became a star on Mideast TV, although we’re not quite there yet.
Ramadan still considers himself a conservative, but not a Republican — a function of Donald Trump. Back when Ramadan was an active Republican, though, he often found himself drafted to be the front man for the party’s outreach to Arabic-speaking voters (who proved to be a key constituency for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign). “I was one of two or three who were fluent in Arabic and active in the Republican Party,” Ramadan says. “I teach about the Middle East, I teach history. I’m active in the party. Some of these stations started asking me to comment during conventions.”
Over time, Ramadan’s reputation grew. For a time, he often appeared on Al Jazeera. “Once they turned into anti-American far-right nuts, I stopped that,” Ramadan says. He’s frequently appeared on France 24, a French channel. These days his four most regular international outlets are the BBC, Sky News (another British channel), Al Arabiya and Al Hadath. And then there are lots of domestic stations, some local to the Washington market, some not, such as CNN and NPR.
Why is Ramadan such a popular guest? “David is a very talented and unique person,” says Pierre Ghanem, a journalist working for Al Arabiya, who emphasized that he was giving his personal views and not speaking for his employer. “When you think about who should be speaking to the public as a guest on screen, you look at this person’s education — you have someone highly educated at an American institution. Two, his experience, first in government and then as an academic, a professor at a college that is very well-ranked. He is talented in so many areas.”
Ramadan, who is also affiliated with the Center for Politics at the University of Virignia, says he’s always been a news junkie; he spends two to three hours each day reading news articles from around the world. In normal times, if there are such things in the Middle East, Ramadan does two to three interviews a week. “Now it’s two to three a day,” he says. “One day last week I did four.”
When I texted him a follow-up question, Ramadan replied that he couldn’t talk just then because he was about to appear on Al Arabiya as part of a panel discussion, with speakers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait — “and yours truly from the Commonwealth.”
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