42 Facts About Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author.

Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post.

Fareed Zakaria has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.

Fareed Zakaria's father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic theologian.

Fareed Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai.

Fareed Zakaria graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right.

Fareed Zakaria later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane.

Fareed Zakaria served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations.

Fareed Zakaria writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly.

Fareed Zakaria has published on a variety of subjects for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic.

Fareed Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role, The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and In Defense of a Liberal Education.

Fareed Zakaria co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World with James F Hoge Jr.

Fareed Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable.

Fareed Zakaria hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS.

Fareed Zakaria's weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, premiered on CNN in June 2008.

Fareed Zakaria supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and for president.

Fareed Zakaria's books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World.

From 2006, Fareed Zakaria has criticized what he views as "fear-based" American policies employed not only in combating terrorism, but in enforcing immigration and drug smuggling laws, and has argued in favor of decriminalization of drugs and citizenship for presently illegal immigrants to the United States of all backgrounds.

Fareed Zakaria located the problem in the political-social-economic stagnation of Arab societies, which then bred an extreme, religious opposition.

Fareed Zakaria portrayed Osama bin Laden as one in a long line of extremists who used religion to justify mass murder.

Fareed Zakaria argued for an intergenerational effort to create more open and dynamic societies in Arab countries, and thereby helping Islam enter the modern world.

Fareed Zakaria argued against the disbanding of the army and bureaucracy yet supported the de-Baathification programs.

Fareed Zakaria continued to argue that a functioning democracy in Iraq would be a powerful new model for Arab politics but suggested that an honest accounting would have to say that the costs of the invasion had been much higher than the benefits.

Fareed Zakaria opposed the Iraq surge in March 2007, writing that it would work militarily but not politically, still leaving Iraq divided among its three communities.

Fareed Zakaria later wrote that the surge "succeeded" militarily but that it did not produce a political compact and that Iraq remained divided along sectarian lines, undermining its unity, democracy, and legacy.

Fareed Zakaria has been nominated five times for the National Magazine Award, and won it once, for his columns and commentary.

Fareed Zakaria's show has won a Peabody Award and been nominated for several Emmys.

Fareed Zakaria was conferred India Abroad Person of the Year 2008 award on 20 March 2009, in New York.

Fareed Zakaria has received honorary degrees from Harvard University, Brown University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Miami, Oberlin College, Bates College, and the University of Oklahoma among others.

Fareed Zakaria was the 2000 Annual Orator of the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania.

In January 2010, Fareed Zakaria was given the Padma Bhushan award by the Indian government for his contribution to the field of journalism.

Fareed Zakaria has served on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University's International House, City College of New York's Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, among others.

Fareed Zakaria was a trustee of Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University and the Trilateral Commission.

In 2020, Fareed Zakaria was awarded the International Center for Journalists Founders Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Fareed Zakaria later told The New York Times that he had briefly attended what he thought was "a brainstorming session".

Fareed Zakaria was not told that a report would be prepared for the President, and in fact, the report did not have his name on it.

In 2010, in protest at the Anti-Defamation League's opposition to the building of the Park51 mosque and Islamic cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site, Zakaria returned the Hubert H Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize awarded to him by the ADL in 2005.

Fareed Zakaria declared that the ADL's opposition to the mosque meant that he could not "in good conscience keep [the award] anymore".

Fareed Zakaria wrote that a "moderate, mainstream version of Islam" is essential to winning the war on terror, and that moves like the ADL's make it harder for such a moderate version of Islam to emerge and thrive.

Fareed Zakaria was suspended for a week in August 2012 while Time and CNN investigated an allegation of plagiarism involving a 20 August column on gun control with similarities to a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore.

However, Slate Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg, who had, months before, exchanged barbs with one of the aforementioned anonymous bloggers on Twitter in defense of Fareed Zakaria, maintained his original position that what Fareed Zakaria did was not plagiarism.

Corrections to selected Fareed Zakaria columns were issued by The Washington Post, which had responded to the initial allegations by telling the Poynter media industry news site that it would investigate.