Biography of Yvonne Ridley .... The British Journalist

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Yvonne Ridley (born 23 April 1958, Stanley, County Durham, England) is a British journalist, war correspondent and Respect Party activist best known for her capture by the Taliban and subsequent conversion to Islam after release, her outspoken opposition to Zionism, and her criticism of Western media portrayals of the War on Terror. Ridley has worked for Press TV, the Iranian-funded English language news channel, and is a director of the TV production company First Witness Ltd., based in Soho, London.

Biography

As a young girl, she already had an ambition for professional reporting. Stimulated at 14 by the publication of a letter she sent to the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, she was determined to become a journalist. At 16, she wrote to every newspaper group in the UK and subsequently she attended a journalism course at the London College of Printing. Since then she has written for The Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, The Mirror and the News of the World and she was deputy editor of Wales on Sunday. She was chief reporter when the Sunday Express, sent her to Afghanistan after 9/11.

She has also worked as a broadcaster, producer and presenter on programmes for BBC TV and radio, CNN, ITN and Carlton TV travelling to Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and the West Bank. A founder member of Women in Journalism, she was also a promoter of women’s rights, although after she converted to Islam, she publicly criticised some aspects of the 'sisterhood' promoted by Western feminism. She is also a founder member of the Stop The War Coalition and the RESPECT political party.

In her spare time Ridley travels throughout the UK and across the globe promoting peace and the anti-war message. She has also delivered lectures on issues relating to Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir and Uzbekistan, Women in Islam, the War on Terror and journalism at universities across the US, Australia, South Africa and the Middle East. Ridley is a founder member of the Friends of Islam, an All Party Parliamentary Group and Women in Journalism. In addition she is a member of the National Union of Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, a founder of Women in Journalism, and is also a member of the Society of Authors. She has written two books called "In The Hands of the Taliban" and "Ticket to Paradise" and is currently writing and researching for two other titles including a biography of Osama bin Laden. Ridley is a patron of the UK-based pressure groups Cageprisoners. She also devotes much of her time to humanitarian work and charities.[citation needed] In 2010 she became the European President of the International Muslim Women's Union and the following year was appointed Vice President of the European Muslim League based in Milan and Geneva.

Personal life

Ridley has married twice. Her first husband was Daoud Zaaroura, a former Palestine Liberation Organization officer. Zaaroura was head of intelligence and a PLO colonel when Ridley met him in Cyprus, where she was working on an assignment for the Newcastle-based Sunday Sun. They had one daughter called Daisy who was born in 1992. Her second husband was a detective with Northumbria Police. During her time on the Sunday Sun newsdesk, she told colleagues she was an officer in the Territorial Army, based on Teesside, specialising in intelligence. She had also told the same to colleagues on the Northern Echo.

Capture by the Taliban

Yvonne Ridley came to prominence on 28 September 2001, when she was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan whilst working for the Sunday Express. Repeatedly refused an entrance visa, she decided to follow the example of BBC reporter John Simpson, who had crossed the border anonymously in a burqa.

Colleagues said Ridley responded to text messages from friends until 26 September 2001, after having told them she would attempt to cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan. It became clear that she had been discovered without passport or visa, and was held by the authorities after being arrested with her guides, the Afghan refugee Nagibullah Muhmand and Pakistani Jan Ali, in a village in the Dour Daba district near the eastern city of Jalalabad in Nangahar, close to the border with Pakistan. She was dressed like an Afghan, but it is believed she was caught after attempting to take photographs, an illegal activity under the Taliban. She was spotted two days later, on 28 September, after slipping across the border by local people who pointed her out to security forces, who took her to Jalalabad for further investigation on possible espionage charges, that carried the death penalty. Shortly before, the Taliban had asked all foreigners to leave the country and had said they would not issue visas to journalists. They threatened that anyone found using a satellite phone would be executed.

She would at least be prosecuted for entering the country illegally, reported the Afghan Islamic Press agency, quoting the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Mullah Abdur Rahman Zahid.

Qudratullah Jamal, the Taliban's information minister, expressed the suspicion that Ridley was possibly a member of a military "special forces" unit like the British SAS. It was also suggested that she and other westerners could be kept by the Taliban as hostages.

The British high commissioner to Pakistan, Hilary Synnott, met the Taliban-ambassador in Islamabad, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef and opened negotiations intended at a quick release of Ridley. While the press in Britain speculated about the reason of her arrest and the seriousness of the suspicion, she was kept in solitary confinement for seven days and then moved to a prison in Kabul. In the prison in Kabul she met the Christian missionary Heather Mercer, who was also kept by the Taliban and was unaware of the latest developments

The same week British bombings on Afghan targets as part of the Operation Enduring Freedom began, while the whereabouts of Ridley were unknown to the British authorities and it was feared that these bombings would jeopardise her release. Then her release, ordered on 'humanitarian grounds' by Taliban-leader Mullah Mohamed Omar, was reported by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. After her release on 9 October 2001, when her Taliban captors escorted her from the Kabul prison to a Pakistan border post at the foot of the Khyber Pass, near Peshawar, she revealed that she had kept a concealed diary inside a box for a toothpaste tube and in the inside of a soap wrapper, and had been on hunger strike throughout her captivity, but denied to have been physically hurt in any way.

After the release of Ridley, her guides Jan Ali and Nagibullah Muhmand, as well as Basmena, the five-year-old daughter of the latter, were kept by the Taliban in a prison in Kabul, according to Reporters sans Frontières.

Conversion to Islam

According to her own account after her release, during her captivity she was asked by one of her captors to convert to Islam; she refused, but gave her word she would read the Qur'an after her release.

In freedom, she kept this promise; she said partly to find out why the Taliban treated women as they do. She said it changed her life.

The Qur'an (the book of Allah), she says describing the holy book of Islam, is a "magna carta for women". She converted to Islam in the summer of 2003, stating that her new faith has helped put behind her broken marriages and a reputation as the "Patsy Stone of Fleet Street." When comparing her treatment to female prisoners' held in American custody, such as Aafia Siddiqui, she said that in Taliban's custody she was given her full privacy as a woman, and was handed the key to the door of her cell to lock from the inside. In 2004, she described her journey of faith for the BBC's religion site (see A Muslim in the Family), as well as in other publications and on other occasions in which she emerged as a "fierce critic of the West".

Subsequent career

Ridley's memoir detailing the 11 days she was held captive, In the Hands of the Taliban: Her Extraordinary Story. Ticket to Paradise (Dandelion Books, LLC 2003), a novel based on the backdrop of 9/11, was written before she converted to Islam; friends say it was never published in the UK because she was too embarrassed by its risque content.

In December 2001 she expressed worries that officers from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, or from other intelligence agencies were plotting to have her killed, in an effort to boost public support for the war in Afghanistan.

She announced a return to Afghanistan, which she did with her daughter Daisy, who also had a great deal of media attention during the captivity of her mother.

In 2003 Ridley was employed by the Qatar-based media organisation Al Jazeera, where, as a senior editor, she helped launch their English language website. On 12 November of that year she was dismissed because Al Jazeera found her "overly-vocal and argumentative style" was incompatible with the station’s programme. After her departure from Qatar, she published an article about her experiences at the channel. Her termination of her employment was also attributed to her campaigning for journalists' rights on the al-Jazeera English channel and website.

She won her case for unfair dismissal against the organisation, but was asked to return in May 2006 when it lodged an appeal against the Qatari court decision. Ridley won the appeal and the judge ordered her original award be doubled. However Al Jazeera once again lodged an appeal with the case going to the Supreme Court for a final hearing. She won that case through lawyers Gebran Majdalany in December 2007 and was awarded 100,000 Qatari riyals, which equates to around £13,885, damages.

Ridley was placed at the top of the Respect coalition's party list at the 2004 European Elections for the North East England region but was not elected. She stood as the Respect candidate at the Leicester South by-election in 2004. She came in fourth, with 12.7% of the vote. However, when she stood again in the May 2005 general election, her share of the vote dropped to 6.4%. In the local government elections in 2006 she stood unsuccessfully for a seat on Westminster Council.

She began presenting The Agenda With Yvonne Ridley, the Islam Channel's politics and current affairs programme, in October 2005. However, the show and Ridley were removed from the channel after she refused to shake the hand of a Saudi prince at a post-Hajj feast.[citation needed] The channel blamed regulator Ofcom for exerting pressure, which the body denied. According to several published reports, Saudi pressure was brought to bear upon the channel head over the hand-shaking incident. The Islam Channel maintains that Ridley "has not been sacked and is still working for us." However in April 2008 Ridley won her case for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination against Mohamed Ali Harrath, the CEO of the Islam Channel as well as the channel. The full 30-page report was published on the website Harry's Place.

Ridley works as a freelance journalist/presenter and for several years regularly worked for Press TV, the Iranian English language 24-hour news channel, hosting many talk shows among them The Agenda being the major one. She also writes a column for the New York-based Daily Muslims and other publications. In May 2008, in an assignment by Press TV, she and the film-maker David Miller shot a documentary based on Guantanamo Bay after being given unprecedented access to the now defunct Camp X-Ray and the operational Camp Delta, by the US military which operates the naval base in Cuba where hundreds of men, defined as enemy combatants, have been detained since January 2002. Their film Guantanamo: Inside the Wire was nominated in the 2009 Roma TV Film Festival in Italy and in the Al Jazeera Film Festival in Doha 2010. Another of her films, In Search of Prisoner 650 was also nominated in 2010 at the Al Jazeera Film Festival.

Since first August 2008, Yvonne Ridley has joined the Free Gaza Movement in Cyprus as it headed for Gaza to challenge the Israeli siege. Press TV followed the progress of the movement and Ridley worked with film-maker Haq Nawaz. The SS Free Gaza and the SS Free Liberty both arrived without incident in Gaza on 23 August. During their brief stay Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh gave a rare interview to Ridley for Press TV. As the free Gaza Movement activists departed four days later Gaza PM Haniyeh issued genuine Palestinian passports with diplomatic status to the majority describing them as Ambassadors for Palestine. The film To Gaza with Love by Nawaz and Ridley was nominated for an award at a London film festival in 2009.

In November 2008 she and the film maker and journalist Hassan al Banna Ghani headed for Afghanistan in the Spring of 2009 to produce a documentary about female prisoners being held by the US. In Search of Prisoner 650 which was broadcast by Press TV. During the making of the film the two journalists came under fire amid a clash between the Taliban and Afghan police on the road to Ghazni.

In March 2009 Ridley and George Galloway founded the organisation Viva Palestina and took a convoy of more than 100 vehicles bearing aid across North Africa to Gaza via the Rafah border. Again collaborating with Ghani, Ridley made a documentary about the 25-day journey called Three Uncles go to Gaza. The film was highly acclaimed by critics at the Istanbul Human Rights film festival in December 2009.

In a column by Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times on 5 July 2009 Ridley along with other journalists was accused of being a stooge for the Iranian regime.

In January 2011 Ridley made a 40 minute exclusive interview with Mona Thwany, widow of the 2010 Stockholm suicide bomber. Swedish journalists were critical of the interview, saying she asked very few critical questions. Ridley said later, this was "sour grapes" as she was the only journalist given access to the widow. The same year another documentary, Fatal Distraction, was produced on the Clinton bombing of the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum, Sudan. In 2012 the film was short-listed at the Al Jazeera Film Festival in Doha.

In the Rotherham by-election, 2012, held on 29 November, Ridley was the Respect Party candidate. "Respect Yourself", a leaflet distributed during the campaign, accused the Labour Party of racism, was attributed by Labour to Respect who reported the matter to the Police and the returning officer. Respect put the incident down to "dirty tricks"; the leaflet was without the legally required notice identifying the source. In the final result, Ridley came fourth with 1,778 votes or just over 8% of the total votes cast. Ridley confirmed later an investigation into the leaflet allegations were dropped after "police failed to find an original copy of the leaflet and The Guardian was guilty of shoddy journalism as it had run the story based only on Labour sources".

Denial of Entry

Because of her views, she was denied an entry in India in 2010 to address the Muslim Women's Conference in Kerala. Later, in January 2013, she was scheduled to attend the Spring of Islam Conference organised by the country's right wing Jamaat-e-Islami Hind at Hyderabad. She was given all necessary clearances by the external affairs ministry, but was denied visa in the last minute because of the tense situation in Hyderabad following the arrest of the local legislator Akbaruddin Owaisi a few days back. However, Ridley, through video conference, addressed three sessions of girls, women and journalists during the Conference.

Yvonne Ridley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

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