MEF's Fall Speaker Series: Iran's Shadow Outreach and Israel's Victory

Daniel Pipes, a historian, has led the Middle East Forum since its founding in 1994. He taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College. He served in five U.S. administrations, received two presidential appointments, and testified before many congressional committees. The author of sixteen books on the Middle East, Islam, and other topics, Mr. Pipes writes a column for the Washington Times and the Spectator; his work has been translated into thirty-nine languages. DanielPipes.org contains an archive of his writings and media appearances; he tweets at @DanielPipes. He received both his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard. The Washington Post deems him "perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam." Al-Qaeda invited Mr. Pipes to convert and Edward Said called him an "Orientalist."

Gregg Roman is the director and chief operations officer of the Middle East Forum. Prior to joining MEF in 2015, he was the director of the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. In 2014, he was named one of the ten most inspiring global Jewish leaders by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as the political advisor to the deputy foreign minister of Israel and worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Mr. Roman speaks at venues around the world about the Middle East and is frequently interviewed on international television channels, including Fox News, i24NEWS, Al-Jazeera, BBC World News, and Israel’s channel 12 and 13. He is a guest opinion contributor at The Hill and has been published in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the Jerusalem Post. He attended American University in Washington, D.C., and the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, where he studied national security studies and political communications.

Jonathan Spyer is a journalist, author, and analyst of Middle East affairs. He is director of research at the Middle East Forum, where he also edits the Middle East Quarterly. He is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) and the founder and director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis (MECRA). Mr. Spyer reports regularly for Janes Intelligence Review, is a columnist at the Jerusalem Post, and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and The Australian newspapers. He has a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The author of two books, Mr. Spyer has extensive experience as a correspondent in the field and has reported from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Ukraine, Jordan, and Israel/West Bank/Gaza. He lives in Jerusalem.

Dexter Van Zile is managing editor of the Middle East Forum publication Focus on Western Islamism (FWI). Prior to his current position, Van Zile worked at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) for sixteen years, where he played a major role in countering misinformation broadcast into Christian churches by Palestinian Christians and refuting anti-Semitic propaganda broadcast by white nationalists and their allies in the U.S. During his tenure at FWI, Van Zile has worked to highlight the voices of Muslims who oppose Islamism.

Izabella Tabarovsky is senior advisor at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP). Her book on Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda campaigns is forthcoming from Routledge. Based in Jerusalem, she holds a BA from University of Colorado-Boulder and an MA from Harvard University.