Speaker Biographies

Morris J. Amitay is the vice chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and is on the Board of the Center for Security Policy. Founder and treasurer of the Washington Public Affairs Council, Mr. Amitay has helped in the contribution of more than two million dollars to Congressional candidates on a bipartisan basis over the past two decades. In the past, Mr. Amitay held various positions in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer in Italy and South Africa. He held positions in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate where he handled defense, energy, and foreign affairs issues. Mr. Amitay later went on to be executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In this role, he frequently testified at Congressional hearings on foreign policy and national security issues and led successful lobbying efforts on issues affecting U.S.–Israel relations. Mr. Amitay has addressed audiences at the Council on Foreign Relations, leading universities, AEI, and the U.S. Naval Academy on the political process and U.S. foreign policy. For the past sixteen years he has written a regular column on political and foreign policy subjects for a number of weekly newspapers, and he also edits a quarterly political newsletter. He is regularly interviewed on national and international television and radio programs.

Ladan Boroumand, a former visiting fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, is a historian from Iran with a doctorate from L’Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of La Guerre des Principes (1999), an extensive study of the tensions throughout the French Revolution between the rights of man and the sovereignty of the nation.

Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, serves on four Senate committees: Appropriations; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Foreign Relations; and the Joint Economic Committee. He is cochair of the Senate Cancer Coalition, cochair of the Congressional Wireless Caucus, and member of Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force. As chair of the Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, he is tackling the ongoing debate over human cloning, the role of the media in public health, and the challenge of revitalizing and growing our technology sector. He is also identifying innovative solutions to our common environmental concerns and reestablishing American leadership in the commercial space sector. As ranking member on the Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee, Mr. Brownback has taken an active role in developing U.S. foreign policy toward India, Pakistan, Central Asia, and Iraq. Throughout his career, Mr. Brownback has worked as an administrator, broadcaster, attorney, teacher, and author. He is the coauthor of two books and numerous articles.

Guy T. Dinmore is a diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C., for the Financial Times. He joined the Financial Times in 1997 in Belgrade as Balkans correspondent, where he covered the entire Balkan region, including the war in Kosovo. In April of 1999 during the Nato bombing, he was expelled from the region by the Serbian government. In October of 1999, the Financial Times bureau in Tehran was reopened and he covered events in Afghanistan and northern Iraq. Previously, Mr. Dinmore covered Africa and the Middle East for Reuters in postings such as London, Vienna, Warsaw, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Nicosia.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at AEI. An expert in Middle East affairs, he focuses on Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the former Soviet Union, as well as terrorism and intelligence. He is the author of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997) and a chapter on Iran in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (Encounter Books, 2000), as well as a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald Tribune, among others. He is also currently working on a book titled For Their Eyes Only. Mr. Gerecht formerly was the director of the Middle East Initiative for the Project for the New American Century and a Middle Eastern specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bernard Hourcade is a senior research fellow at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and a professor of geography for Ph.D candidates at the University Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INaLCO), and University Paris X Nanterre. He is head of the research team Monde Iranien at CNRS, Paris III, INaLCO, and EPHE as well as head of post-graduate Iranian studies at INaLCO and Paris III. His current research focuses on the changes in society, politics, and geography in relation to the development of cities and urban culture in Iran, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Mr. Hourcade has been presented with many honors throughout his career, including Esquire, Ordre National du Mérit be the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Brunet Award, and Schlumberger Award. He has published a variety of articles and essays for collected works. His books include L’Iran au XXe siècle (1996), Atlas d’Iran (1998)--for which he received the Cultural Research Award by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance in Tehran--and most recently, Iran: nouvelle identitiés d’une république (2002).

Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI. An expert in contemporary history and international affairs, Mr. Ledeen contributes frequently to the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary and serves as a foreign editor of the American Spectator. During the Reagan administration, he was a consultant to the national security adviser, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the State Department, and was a special adviser to the secretary of state. He is the author of twelve books, including Grave New World (Oxford University Press, 1985), which predicted the crisis in the Soviet Union five years before it occurred; Freedom Betrayed: How the United States Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away (AEI Press, 1996); Machiavelli on Modern Leadership (St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Tocqueville on American Character (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and most recently, The War against the Terror Masters (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He began his teaching career in 1938 as a lecturer in Islamic history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Britain. He was a professor at the University of London until 1974, at which point he began teaching at Princeton University. Mr. Lewis's initial research focused on medieval Islamic history, especially that of religious movements such as the Ismailis and Assassins, but he has recently been studying the contemporary Middle East and especially the history of the Ottoman Empire. He is the author of numerous publications, including Islam and the West (Oxford University Press, 1993); Islam in History (Open Court Publishing Company, 1993); The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Publishing, 1994); Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery (Oxford University Press, 1994); The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (Touchstone Books, 1995); The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (Schocken Books, 1998); A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters, and History (Princeton Review, 2000); and What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Uri Lubrani is adviser to the Israeli minister of defense. Previously, he was appointed by Prime Minister Shamir to head the Israeli task force that planned and executed Operation Soloman, which airlifted the larger part of the Jewish community of Ethiopia from Addis-Abba to Israel. Mr. Lubrani also served as government coordinator for Lebanese affairs and chief Israeli negotiator for the release of Israeli hostages and prisoners of war. His ambassadorships include: head of Israeli mission to Tehran, Iran; ambassador of Israel to Ethiopia; and ambassador of Israel to Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Mr. Lubrani has also served as head of the private bureau and political adviser to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and adviser of Arab Affairs to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.

Clifford D. May is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Mr. May has worked in the field of international relations, journalism, communications, and politics holding positions such as associate editor for international news at Newsweek; senior editor of Geo Magazine, foreign correspondent at the New York Times, where he established the Times’ West Africa bureau and, as bureau chief, covered more than a score of African nations; associate editor of the Rocky Mountain News; director of communications for the Republican National Committee and editor of the official Republican magazine, Rising Tide; senior managing director in the Washington, D.C., office of BSMG Worldwide, a firm specializing in public affairs advocacy, public relations, and media relations. Mr. May has also provided special coverage for CBS Radio News, Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS, moderated an interview program on KRMA-TV (a PBS station), as well as the nationally distributed TCI cable television series, "Race for the Presidency," which featured Dick Lamm, Gary Hart, and Don Hodel.

S. Rob Sobhani is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University where he specializes in U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East with a concentration on Persian Gulf security issues and the Caspian Sea region. His academic research has focused on the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, Islamic fundamentalism, state sponsorship of terrorism, and energy security. More specifically, Mr. Sobhani has worked on solutions to containing Islamic fundamentalism and state-sponsored terrorism. He is the author of numerous articles on the subject of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. Mr. Sobhani is also president of Caspian Energy Consulting, a firm specializing in domestic and international energy matters.

Meyrav Wurmser is the director of the Center for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She is a frequent guest on radio and television, including BBC, Fox News, CNN, PBS, and CNBC. Ms. Wurmser has written numerous books and monographs on Israel, the Arab world, and Zionism. Her most recent book is The Schools of Ba’athism—a Study of Syrian Schoolbooks (MEMRI, 2000). Formerly the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Ms. Wurmser has also taught political science at the Johns Hopkins University and the United States Naval Academy.