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Israel, Iran and the United States - with Trita Parsi

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Event Date

11/6/2007 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Please arrive early for registration

Location

World Affairs Council Auditorium

Address

312 Sutter Street
Second Floor
San Francisco, California 94108

Trita Parsi, President, National Iranian American Council

Trita Parsi was born in Iran and grew up in Sweden. He earned a Master's Degree in International Relations at Uppsala University, a second Master's Degree in Economics at Stockholm School of Economics, and a PhD in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University SAIS.

Dr. Parsi's articles on Middle East affairs have been published in The Financial Times, Jane's Intelligence Review, The Globalist, The Jerusalem Post, The Forward, BitterLemons, and The Daily Star. He is a frequent commentator on US-Iranian relations and Middle Eastern affairs, and has appeared on BBC World News, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN (Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°), CNN International (Your World Today), Al Jazeera, C-Span, NPR, MSNBC, Voice of America, and British Channel 4.

He has served as an advisor to Congressman Bob Ney on Middle East issues and is a co-founder and current President of the National Iranian American Council, a non-partisan, non-profit organization promoting Iranian-American participation in American civic life.

Dr. Parsi has also worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the UN in New York, where he served in the Security Council handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, and Western Sahara, and on the General Assembly's Third Committee addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Iraq.

With talk of the Iranian nuclear threat heating up, tension between Iran and Israel is dangerously high and the risk of a war involving the United States looms. To Trita Parsi, efforts to defuse those tensions have failed because the real roots of the hostility between Iran and Israel have eluded Washington policymakers. Drawing on his extensive personal interviews with key policy players in all three countries, Dr. Parsi examines the strategic and geopolitical tensions feeding the growing conflict between Iran and Israel. In his new book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, Parsi describes the explosive Israeli-Iranian rivalry of the 1990s that poisoned American and Iranian efforts to improve their bilateral relations, and warns of a coming clash under Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad.

Cosponsored by Stacey’s Bookstore

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