Adrian P. Calamel
A lifelong student of MENA but with no formal training Adrian left the business world and pursued a MA in Middle Eastern history after losing a close friend in the South Tower on 9/11 and recognizing a dangerous comprehension gap in the American populace. For over a decade he’s taught college students the history of the Middle East, modern terrorism, and contemporary topics such as the Arab/Israeli conflict. In January 2022 he left academia to focus on educating a wider audience, writing
books for the average American reader that explain the evolution and dangers of terrorism. His first book will examine the Lockerbie disaster and the geopolitical cover-up to exonerate Hafez Assad, Ayatollah Khomeini and pin the 1988 terrorist attack on Qaddafi’s Libya. Additionally, Adrian has written
articles covering a range of topics for various outlets including MEF’s Focus on Western Islamism, The Levant News, The Washington Outsider, made appearances on Manoto TV, WION, NewsX, aNews, AlQahera, Coalition Radio and quoted in Paris Match, Ecran De Veille, ElDostor, The Media Line, La Verità. The last several years Adrian has increasingly focused on Yemen, representing NGOs at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, addressing the humanitarian disaster whilst tracking Houthi, Hezbollah, and IRGC involvement in the multilayered crisis.
Cynthia Farahat
Cynthia Farahat is an Egyptian-American bestselling author of The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Industry of Death.
Farahat is a columnist, counterterrorism and counterintelligence expert, and former editor of The Journal of Central and Eastern European African Studies (JCEEAS).
Farahat co-founded the Liberal Egyptian Party in Egypt, which advocated for peace with Israel, free market economy, and the separation of mosque and state. She studied Sunni and Shia Islamic jurisprudence and history for more than twenty-five-years.
Farahat co-authored several books including, “Desecration of A Heavenly Religion” which was officially banned by Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 2008 for its criticism of Egypt’s blasphemy law. She was a fellow at the Middle East Forum for eleven years.
Farahat landed on a Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda affiliated group hit list.
She is officially banned from entering Lebanon for her work fostering regional peace. For almost a decade under Housni Mubarak’s regime, she received daily death threats from Islamists. After her belated brother was kidnapped and tortured by Islamists, her friend was murdered, and they attempted to assassinate her in October 2011, Farahat immigrated to the United States.
Farahat has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, briefed more than three hundred congressional offices, and advised US intelligence and law enforcement agencies. She received awards for her work in counter-terrorism. Her work has been published in many national and international outlets, and her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Farahat’s work is very popular both in the West and in Moderate Islamic countries which have suffered decades of terrorism.
Giovanni Giacalone
Giovanni Giacalone is currently serving as researcher at the Israel Defense and Security Forum, research department.
He is also senior analyst at the Europe desk for the UK-based think-tank Islamic Theology of Counter-Terrorism, for the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies-Itstime (Catholic University of Milan) and for Centro Studi Machiavelli.
From 2014 to 2016 he was an associate researcher for Istituto Studi Politica Internazionale-Ispi’s “Observatory on Terrorism”.
Since 2021 he is the coordinator for the “Latin America group” of the International Institute for the Study of Security-ITSS.
Giacalone conducted extensive fieldwork on Islamist extremism in Italy and was the country-coordinator for the Globsec European project “From criminals to terrorists and back”, to analyze the crime-terror nexus among jihadist foreign fighters. He currently collaborates with the media and he is the author of several books and chapters on Islamist extremism and jihadism. He teaches security managers, post-grad students and law enforcers on Italian soil, and has testified in an audition on security to the Italian Parliament.
Since 2012, Giacalone has also been monitoring and analyzing the street-gang phenomenon in Italy, collaborating with partners in the United States, Italy, with the media, and analyzing the phenomenon for the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies and for the International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA).
In 2023 Giacalone published the book “The Tablighi Jamaat in Europe” for the UAE-based Trends Research and Advisory; researching the potential presence of radicalizing triggers within the Indian Islamist Movement, and he is now working on his second book on the topic.
Giacalone is also a senior advisor for the Monitoring Jihadism Italy project and teaches the “Islamist terrorism” course and the “Terrorism screening and profiling” course at Rome’s Unimarconi. He is a certified behavioral detection officer.
Irina Tsukerman
Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security lawyer based in New York and a Fellow at the Arabian Peninsula Institute. She runs a boutique national security law practice. She is a member of the North American Society for Intelligence History. She is a Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. She is a member of the American Bar Association’s Energy and Environment and Science and Technology Sections. She is the Program Vice Chair in the Oil and Gas Subcommittee. She is also a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Middle East and North African Affairs Committee and an affiliate member of the Foreign & Comparative Law Committee. In addition, Irina Tsukerman is the President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider, a project of Scarab Rising, focused on foreign policy, geopolitics, security, and human rights. Irina hosts The Washington Outsider Report program on The Coalition Radio station, and frequently writes about world affairs in diverse US and international publications. She has appeared in the media all over the world as a geopolitical specialist dedicated to actionable analysis, and her writings and comments have been translated to over a dozen languages. Irina is a member of the editorial board of The Maghreb and Orient Courier. She is a member of the New York-based Foreign Policy Association. Irina specializes in information warfare; she has written and spoken extensively on active measures by Russia, China, and Iran and influence campaigns by Middle Eastern state actors, as well as on the impact of active measures and influence campaigns on the human rights and NGO world; she has also published on a wide range of global issues touching on energy, geostrategy, strategical alliances, Great Power competition and its impact on geopolitics, domestic policy, and business, information security and digital rights/cybersecurity, big tech, terrorism and extremism, as well as issues in intelligence and counterintelligence. Most recently, Irina was honored for her contributions as a woman leader and a global humanitarian at the World Humanitarian Drive’s Trilateral Trade for Peace Conference in London. Her comments and writings have been translated into over a dozen languages; her latest major appearance was on Australia’s #1 podcast the Red Line to discuss counterterrorism and economic warfare in Mozambique.
Irina just moderated a high profile panel on The Legal Framework for Understanding Information Warfare in Ukraine at the New York City Bar Association. She most recently presented at “Character Assassination, Illiberalism, and the Erosion of Civic Rights” conference by Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Lab (George Mason University) and University of Amsterdam. Irina was recently honored with a Certificate of Appreciation from Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security for her work in countering Russian disinformation. Most recently, she presented on oil and gas agreements, EEZ, and maritime border disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean and the impact of the Israel-Hamas war and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on these legal issues.
* Gave a talk on the role of Technology in International Relations at the Western Caspian University in Baku, Azerbaijan (05/07/2024)