Janet Lee Stevens (December 1, 1950 – April 18, 1983) was an American journalist, human rights advocate, translator, and scholar of popular Arabic theater.
[3] Today, at the University of Pennsylvania, the Janet Lee Stevens Memorial Fund – whose early recipients in the 1980s included the literary critic Edward Said[4] – continues to give grants to scholars whose work promotes Arab-American understanding.
[2] She was married during this time to the Tunisian playwright Taoufik Jebali, who years later wrote dialogue for the acclaimed 1990 film of Férid Boughedir, Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces.
Writing under the pseudonym June Disney, she published, for example, an article on the Israeli use of cluster bombs and other advanced explosives in the war in Lebanon, and the injuries that Palestinians (including children) in the Burj al-Barajneh camp sometimes sustained when they encountered them or picked them up.
[15] According to one source, Stevens and Le Carré became friends; he consulted her on possible sites for filming in the region; and she was reportedly scheduled to fly to Cyprus to see him a day after the bombing in which she died.
[19] Stevens toured Sabra and Shatila immediately after the massacre; witnessed the Red Crescent's efforts to collect the dead bodies, some of which, she reported, showed evidence of rape and mutilation; and interviewed survivors.
One of these survivors, diplomat Anne Dammarell, wrote a 1994 Georgetown University MA thesis in which she argued that the bombing caused the American Foreign Service Officers posted in the embassy to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms "similar to those faced by war veterans" but at a time when the U.S. State Department "did not provide sufficient training and follow-up support to allow them to recognize, acknowledge, and fully process the trauma".
[28] This organization had links to the Lebanese Shi'a party, Hezbollah, and operated with support from the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which objected to Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon in June 1982 in response to PLO attacks.
[citation needed] Twenty years after the bombing, Anne Dammarell encouraged the family of Stevens, representing one of eighty plaintiffs of the dead and injured, to join a civil suit in U.S. Federal District Court of Washington, DC against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
The hearing of this case, Dammarell v. the Islamic Republic of Iran, began on September 8, 2003, and cited evidence that agents of the Iranian government had supported, funded, and planned the embassy attack.
[31] Bird also claimed that Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian Revolutionary guard identified as having masterminded the embassy attack in which Stevens and others died, later defected to the United States.
Without citing his sources, Bird claimed that President George W. Bush authorized granting asylum and witness protection to Asgari in return for information about the Iranian nuclear program.
[32] Claims about Asgari continued to surface, as in a March 10, 2019 article in The Hill that urged President Donald J. Trump to expose details that could bear upon the kidnapping of the former FBI agent and CIA consultant Robert Levinson who disappeared in Iran in 2007.
[34] During her time as a doctoral student at Penn, Stevens introduced her mentor, Roger Allen, to the novels of the Saudi-Iraqi writer, Abdul Rahman Munif.
[22] The second winner of the Janet Lee Stevens Memorial Award, in 1987, was Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary and music critic, political advocate, and theorist of Orientalism.
[37] Beginning in 1996, when George McGovern, Senator of South Dakota and 1972 Democratic party nominee for U.S. president, came to speak at Penn, the Janet Lee Stevens Fund supported an annual lecture series.
[38] Other distinguished speakers included Professor John L. Esposito, founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, who lectured on "The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality" in 2003.
[40][41] Since 2002, the Janet Lee Stevens Fund has supported an annual grant program at the University of Pennsylvania for an MA or PhD student who demonstrates academic excellence, a commitment to Arabic study, and a record of promoting cultural understanding.
[42] Past winners include the literary scholar John Joseph Henry ("Chip") Rossetti, translator of works including Bahaa Abdelmagid's novellas Saint Theresa and Sleeping with Strangers (American University in Cairo Press, 2010);[43] the folklorist Dana Hercbergs, author of Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem (Wayne State University Press, 2018);[44] the political scientist Murad Idris, author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019);[45] and the sociolinguist Uri Horesh, co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics (Routledge, 2019).