146 Voice for Rebellion and Relief Activists also lobbied locally against individuals affiliated with the regime to pressure them to resign and to shame their affiliated sponsors and organizations. For example, Syrian American students and local activists launched a campaign against Dr. Hazem Chehabi, the Syrian Consul General in Newport Beach, California, and president of the University of California Irvine Foundation. They organized these events in conjunction with other student groups at UCI to pressure Chehabi to resign from his post. As I observed firsthand, our silent demonstration during a UCI Foundation fundraiser caused a significant disturbance in the proceedings as guests in their black-tie attire gawked and pointed at us from the red carpet.2 Other Syrians got creative in their broadcasting work after weekly and monthly protests died down in 2014. Lina Sergie of Chicago launched the One Hundred Thousand Names Project to communicate the extreme costs of regime repression during the third anniversary of the revolution. Partnering with activists in SAC, she recounted, I saw this video online that had a graphic visualization of different facts about the Syrian revolution. One of the facts in that video says, if you were to read one hundred thousand names of the people who have died in Syria so far, it would take you seventy-two hours. So I emailed [my colleagues] and I told them, let’s read the names of the dead for March 15 [2014 anniversary] in front of the White House for seventy-two hours. We got tons of media. We repeated this again in June in front of the UN. It was a global reading. And in several cities, including inside Syria, the hundred thousand names were read in twentyfour hours during the “election” of Bashar al-Assad, the reelection. We did it again in August 2014 in front of the White House where we read fourteen hundred names [of the chemical weapons’ attack victims from August 2013]. There are two components of the memorial: the Oral Memorial for Syria, the actual reading of the names. Also, the book of names. We printed out fifteen copies. We hand delivered them to the fifteen ambassadors of the UN Security Council in coordination with the Syrian National Coalition. Not everybody accepted the book, but we tried to take it to everybody. [US Ambassador to the UN] Samantha Power still has the book, according to Qusai Zakarya,3 on her desk. Yemenis also staged regular demonstrations. Activists in the United States gathered regularly in front of the Yemeni embassy and White House, the United Nations in New York, and in their local communities in Dearborn and San Francisco. As a New York–based organizer named Rabyaah recalled, “We were like, as long as there are people on the streets every day in Yemen, for 2 3 Chehabi later resigned from his post as Consular General after the United States and other governments, including the Cameron administration in Britain, expelled diplomats in response to the Houla Massacre of May 2012. During this terrible event, more than one hundred civilians, including families with their children, were slaughtered at close range by regime forces. Qusai Zakarya is the nom de guerre of Kassim Eid, a Palestinian Syrian activist from the Damascus suburbs of Mouadamiya, Syria. He gained international attention with the help of diaspora activists during his hunger strike against regime violence from his home. He was gassed during the August 21, 2013 chemical weapons attack by the regime; he eventually escaped Syria as a refugee. See Eid (2017) and Eid and di Giovanni (2018) for his personal account of these trials. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press