Westminster Institute talks

Yigal Carmon is President and founder of MEMRI , which bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, and intellectual trends.

This major retelling of the Suez Crisis of 1956—one of the most important events in the history of U.S. policy in the Middle East—shows how President Eisenhower came to realize that Israel, not Egypt, is America’s strongest regional ally. Read the transcript: https://bit.ly/2TLWcX3

Robert R. Reilly is director of the Westminster Institute. He has been on the board since its founding. In his 25 years of government service, he has taught at National Defense University (2007), and served in the Office of The Secretary of Defense, where he was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006). He participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 as Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Mini...

The death of Osama bin Laden significantly affected both sides in the War on Terror. The most important questions now are how will al Qaeda and its associated movements respond to the death of their leader, and is the United States safer or in more danger today? The Westminster Institute is bringing together world-renowned authorities and national security practitioners for a one-day special event...

Dr. S. Frederick Starr is the author of Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane , which chronicles a forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. The book has been translated into 13 languages. He is the founding Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk...

Eyewitness Dominican  Sister Diana Momeka , during a hearing before Congress in 2015, testified: “Uprooted and forcefully displaced, we have realized that ISIS’s plan is to evacuate the land of Christians and wipe the earth clean of any evidence that we ever existed.” Sr. Diana’s own convent was destroyed by ISIS. She and Syriac Catholic Father Behnam Benoka founded and run the...

Celina Realuyo is Professor of Practice at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University where she focuses on U.S. national security, illicit networks, transnational organized crime, counterterrorism and threat finance issues. From 2002-2006, Professor Realuyo served as the State Department Director of Counterterrorism Finance Programs in the U.S. S...

Dr. John Lenczowski , is President of the Institute of World Politics and former Director of European and Soviet Affairs, National Security Council.

Stephen Ulph is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation and Founder and Former Editor of Jane’s Terrorism Security Monitor .

Samuel Tadros is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom , where he researches the rise of Islamist movements in the Middle East and its implications for religious freedom and regional politics. Prior to joining Hudson in 2011, Tadros was a Senior Partner at the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth , an organization that aims to spread the ideas of classical liberalism in...

Robert R. Reilly  is the Executive Director of the Westminster Institute. In his 25 years of government service, he has taught at National Defense University (2007), and served in the Office of The Secretary of Defense, where he was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006). He participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 as Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of information. Befo...

The death of Osama bin Laden will significantly affect both sides in the war on terror. The most important questions now are how will al Qaeda and its associated movements respond to the death of their leader, and is the United States safer or in more danger today? The Westminster Institute is bringing together world-renowned authorities and national security practitioners for a one-day special ev...

Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph. D. is co-author of the just released book, ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate . He is Deputy Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and is also Adjunct Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He formerly served as Professor and the Chair of the Sociology Department at Harran University...

ISIS is not merely a terrorist organization, it is a malicious idea. ISIS and Al Qaeda have the same ideological underpinning. We need to confront this pernicious thinking with an enlightened, open-minded thought – one that accepts The Other and co-exists with him, enlightened ideas emanating from within Islam. Mr. Gamal Arabi  will introduce a non-usual approach to fighting the Jihadi t...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Suzanne K. Scholte is one of the world’s leading activists in the North Korea human rights movement having worked for over 18 years to promote the freedom, human rights and dignity of the North Korean people. Scholte began a program in 1996 to host the first North Korean defectors in the United States to speak out abo...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Congressman Frank Wolf was widely acknowledged as the “conscience” of the Congress during his long service in the House of Representatives. First elected in 1980, he left Congress at the end of his 17th term in 2015 to focus exclusively on human rights and religious freedom. Long before the “Arab Spring” turned into a...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute The West desperately needs a broad-based anti-Islamist strategy to combat the global reach of this deadly ideology that threatens freedom and liberty everywhere. Dr. Jasser says that, “American Muslims, living in this unparalleled laboratory of freedom, have a unique moral obligation to lead the way. For too long we h...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Dr.  Michael Ledeen’s  new book ,  Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), is co-authored with Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Senator Joseph Lieberman writes, it is a book “worth rea...

The media and the current U.S. administration have struggled since 2014 to define ISIS. Some have said they are not Islamic at all, which, while well-meaning, seems to fail on its face as ISIS draws upon Islamic texts to justify their actions. ISIS is an apocalyptic, genocidal, Islamic cult. We must address and combat ISIS as a cult to defeat it. The media and the current U.S. administration have...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Religious extremists in the Middle East, both Sunni and Shia, have succeeded in weaponizing memory. They wield historical precedence to inform and legitimize their actions and strategies. Nibras Kazimi , an Iraqi citizen, will discuss how they do this and how to undermine their legitimacy by de-weaponizing precedence....

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Our legal architecture for fighting the infiltration of radical Islam is stuck in a pre-1993 Cold War framework. That framework prohibits the exclusion of aliens on the grounds of ideological animus against the U.S. as opposed to terrorist activities. We face an ideology that promotes acts of mass terror and thrives o...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Richard Miniter is the CEO of American Media Institute , a New York Times bestselling author, and a national security columnist for Forbes. His seventh book, Leading From Behind , examines the consequences of Obama’s foreign policies. Miniter sheds new light on key decisions of the past eight years and the damage infl...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Clare M. Lopez , Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy , is the co-author of the recently published book Gülen and the Gülenist Movement: Turkey’s Islamic Supremacist Cult and its Contributions to the Civilization Jihad . Fethullah Gülen is the head of a vast political network in T...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Andrew Doran is co-founder of In Defense of Christians (IDC), a nonprofit organization that advocates for the protection and preservation of Christians in the Middle East. He presented IDC’s new, nearly-300 page report on the ongoing genocide in the Middle East, which was presented to Secretary of State John Kerry ( r...

Follow us at westminster-institute.org and youtube.com/user/WestminsterInstitute Kanan Makiya , born in Baghdad, is the author of the best-selling Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq , the book that put Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist regime in the crosshairs. His new book, The Rope , which was available for signing, is an unflinching novel about Iraqi failure in the wake of the 2003 American...