Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2023, p. 73
Obituaries
GEORGE HANNA, 94, died July 4 in Santa Ana, CA. Hanna was born in Brooklyn, NY, and served during the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. He and his wife, Mary, met in the emergency room of the Uniontown, PA hospital, where she worked as a nurse. While Hanna was in army training in 1951, Mary took a bus in her wedding dress to meet him at his base in Baltimore, MD, where they were married. After he returned from duty in 1953, the couple started a construction business in Uniontown, PA, and moved to California in 1959.
His business, Hanna Construction, is responsible for many buildings in Orange County, CA. He personally oversaw the construction of churches from Youngstown, OH to California.
Hanna served on the board of the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) since 1988, the same year he ran for the office of mayor of the city of Santa Ana. He served on the Blue Ribbon Committee to plan the future city of Santa Ana. Hanna co-founded the Arab American Republican Club of Orange County, served on the Central Committee of the Orange County Republican Party and sat on the board of the Orange County World Affairs Council.
He and Mary, who died in 2012, participated in six marathons in cities from Boston to Los Angeles. Hanna is survived by his four children: Joan Borack, George, Sam and David; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. —Samir Twair
EVE TETAZ, died June 7, in Washington, DC. She was a retired English teacher and social justice advocate, who protested the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as detentions at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay and the use of remote-controlled drones by the military. Tetaz was arrested so many times that police and judges knew her by her first name. Behind bars, Tetaz tutored inmates who called her “Grandma.” Her husband, Rene Tetaz, who died in 1995, worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development while she taught English in Iran, Thailand, France and Ghana. “She was always searching for a deeper engagement,” said Marja Hilfiker, who met Tetaz at church, “and she found that in protesting all the wrongs in the world.”
RAMZI CHOUEIRI, 51, a Lebanese chef with best-selling cookbooks and a popular TV cooking show, died in Beirut on June 18, after a heart attack. His TV show, which featured callers asking him for advice, ran from 1994 to 2010. Chef Ramzi managed to get into the Guinness World Records four times in charity events: the largest servings of hummus; tabbouleh; falafel and a chickpea-tahini mix called fatteh.
In 2003, rockets fired at the Beirut building housing Future Television, a media group owned by then-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, gutted the newsroom and studios, including the set for Choueiri’s show. The next day, Chef Ramzi did his show amid the burned debris. “Our message is one of peace,” he told Reuters in 2008, “cooking is one area where people can get along.”
In 2018, Chef Ramzi hung up his apron to devote himself entirely to Al-Kafaat, a foundation founded by his father Nadim Choueiri that provides free care for thousands of children with special needs and from underprivileged backgrounds.
SINÉAD O'CONNOR, 56, the acclaimed Dublin singer/songwriter best known for her 1990 smash hit “Nothing Compares 2 U” and her fearless honesty, died July 26, in London. At age 13, O’Connor ran away from her abusive alcoholic mother and ended up in a correctional school run by nuns. O’Connor, who was raised Catholic, protested child sexual abuse in the church, a decade before newspapers drew widespread attention to the scandal. When her mother died in 1985, O’Connor took a photo of Pope John Paul II off her wall and carried it around; she tore it up in an act of protest in 1992 on “Saturday Night Live.”
While all the articles published after her death included that act, most omitted her support for Palestinians. She told an Irish music magazine, “Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the [expletive] Israeli authorities are doing.”
O’Connor began using the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat offstage after converting to Islam in 2018, and became better known for her spiritualism, activism and for speaking out about mental health struggles. She was devastated by the January 2022 suicide of her teenage son Shane.
When O'Connor received the Classic Irish Album award on March 9, 2023 for “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” she dedicated her award to “each and every member of Ireland’s refugee community....You’re very welcome in Ireland. Mashallah. I love you very much and I wish you happiness. Thank you.”
