Anastasia Norton is manager at the strategic consulting firm Monitor 360 and former senior analyst in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project and senior fellow at the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Center for Middle East Policy. His areas of expertise include counterterrorism, Arab-Israeli issues, Persian Gulf security, and India-Pakistan relations.

Daniel Byman is a senior fellow and research director at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. He also serves as a professor at Georgetown University. His research areas include counterterrorism and Middle East security. He was a staff member on the 9/11 Commission and worked for the U.S. government. He is the author of A High Price: The Triumphs […]

Noman Benotman is president of the Quilliam Foundation, a London think tank that focuses on religious extremism. He is an expert on Islamic extremists.

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, the website Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East and The International New York Times. He is also the author of Islam Without Extremes. In 2011, he delivered a TED Talk on the subject of faith versus tradition in Islam.

Karima Bennoune is a professor of international law at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, is an authority on the Abrahamic religions and author of many books on the subject. Her most recent book is Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence.

Neil J. Kressel is a professor of psychology at William Patterson University in Wayne, N.J., and the author of Bad Faith: The Danger of Religious Extremism. His scholarship focuses on religion, psychology, prejudice and race relations, history, journalism, politics and political research. He is an expert on religious extremism and anti-Semitism.

Philip Freeman is a professor of Classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. His research focuses on Classical Mythology, Ancient Roman Culture, Greece and Rome in film, as well as Latin.