Guess who's Middle Eastern?

I've just about exhausted my Guess Who's Asian? series for the time being, so I'm going to cast my net a bit wider to the South-West part of Asia. There are lots of famous people who are not widely known to have Middle Eastern ancestry; here are a few. I'm pretty sure none of them are terrorists, in case you are worried about that sort of thing.

Steve Jobs (left) - the late co-founder of Apple was was adopted, but his birth parents were Abdulfattah Jandali, an Arab (Syrian) immigrant to the US, and Joanne Schieble, an American of Swiss-German ancestry.

Wentworth Miller (right) - the apparently drool-inducing star of Prison Break, Wentworth Miller's family tree reads like the Human Genome Project; a father of African-American, Jewish, Cherokee, English and German ancestry, and a mother of Russian, French, Dutch, Lebanese and Syrian descent.

Kelly Slater (left) - arguably the best-known surfer of all time, the Florida-born Slater has Syrian ancestry on his father's side and Irish on his mother's.

F Murray Abraham (right) - The veteran actor, best known for his Oscar for Best Actor in Amadeus, and his role in Scarface, was born to an Italian-American mother and Syrian Christian father. The F stands for Fahrid.

Casey Kasem (left) - if you are like me and grew up listening to the American Top 40, you'd know doubt remember this guy's archetypical radio DJ voice. He was born in Detroit to Lebanese Druze parents, and while his surname is a giveaway as to his Middle-Eastern heritage, he pronounced it in such an American way that it never occurred to me. His real name is actually Kamal Amin Kasem.

Paul Anka (right) - pop idol from the 50s and 60s, best known for the songs Diana and Put Your Head on My Shoulder. Anka is Canadian-born to parents of Lebanese parents.

Andre Agassi - former world number 1 Tennis player; his father, Emmanuel Agassi (originally Aghassian) was an Iranian-born Olympic boxer who was of Armenian and Syrian Assyrian descent.

Julia Sawalha (right) - the UK actress best known as the straight-laced daughter Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous. Her father is Jordanian actor Nadim Sawalha, and her mother is British.

Mitch Daniels (left) - Governor of India and formerly Republican presidential hopeful, Pennsylvania-born Daniels' paternal grandparents were Syrian Christians.

Colombian pop star Shakira (right) is usually thought of as Latin American, but her name (full name Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll) also reveals her Arabic (Lebanese) origins; Colombia actually has over 800,000 people of Lebanese descent. She also has Italian, Spanish and Macedonian ancestry.