An inside look into the mindset of jihad, including firsthand interviews with some of the world’s most sinister terrorists.
During an interrogation in Afghanistan, when asked how long the jihadists intended to fight, a Taliban commander uttered the words, “If it takes a thousand years.” This chilling statement illustrates both how terrorists of this level operate and the generational approach they take when it comes to bringing destruction to the world.
The West is facing a determined enemy with a fundamentally different world view. Author and former Army Captain Jesse Petrilla provides unique insight into the jihadist mind, featuring interviews with Taliban and Al-Qaeda members just after their capture, interviews with international journalists and professors, warnings from European politicians, as well as experiences from travels throughout the Islamic world.
If It Takes a Thousand Years delves into the policies which have enabled our enemies both at home and abroad, providing positive solutions as to how America and the West can confront this threat and protect their way of life.
About the author:
Former Army Captain Jesse Petrilla has traveled worldwide on fact-finding missions, researching the mindset of the jihadists and the policies that enable them. These places include Jordan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Israel (including the West Bank), Egypt, England, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, meeting with members of parliament, mayors, and everyday citizens. He has served as a civilian advisor to the U.S. Department of State, and was a Liaison Officer in the Army to the Afghan secret police, facilitating the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda members. Jesse has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and other media on numerous occasions, and has published articles in FrontPage Magazine, Breitbart, and other publications.
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/let-israel-decide-how-to-respond-to-irans-missile-attack/
President Biden pushes Israel not to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack by targeting its nuclear or oil sites, while former President Trump blasts Biden and suggests that, in fact, Israel should hit Iran’s nuclear sites.
Their public disagreement over Israel’s proper course reminds us that, notwithstanding Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s dictum of the early Cold War years that politics should stop “at the water’s edge,” it rarely has.
Presidents have long shaped their foreign policy with domestic politics in mind. FDR promised the nation just days before his re-election in 1940 that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” though he knew that America’s entry into World War II was both necessary and inevitable. JFK planned to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam but not until his second term, fearing an earlier withdrawal would ignite a “who lost Vietnam” backlash that threatened his re-election in 1964.
Now, a month before our Election Day, Israel is battling Iran and its terror proxies on multiple fronts, civilian lives are at risk in multiple nations, global leaders are pushing for ceasefires and “de-escalation,” and Vice President Kamala Harris is battling Trump for Jewish and Muslim votes in a razor-close contest.
But, however understandable in political terms, Biden and Trump’s comments are nevertheless badly misguided in geopolitical terms because they undercut our closest regional ally at an ominous moment.
Consider, by way of historical example, the absurdity of such public counsel to any nation under siege.
“We shall carry the attack against the enemy,” FDR told Congress a month after Pearl Harbor, with nearly 2,500 service members and civilians dead and the United States now at war with both Japan and Germany. “We shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him.”
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/north-korea-and-iran-the-evil-axis-of-missiles/
New ‘Partnership’ Of Evil: North Korea and Iran – It should not surprise us that Iran is acquiring technology and ballistic missiles from North Korea. The newly resurgent “Axis of Evil” is alive and well in 2024.
North Korea has always needed hard currency, and providing the missiles and technical know-how to Iran in exchange for monetary funding and goodwill is irresistible to diabolical North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Sadly, the DPRK has been working with Tehran on missile tech for years, and the results of that partnership could have wide-ranging impacts all over the Middle East and, specifically for Israel.
North Korea Aids Iran in Missile Development
Iran, for example, has a ballistic missile it calls the Emad. This model is actually a Shahab-3, which itself is a copy of the North Korean ballistic missile called NoDong. The Emad has a more extended range than the NoDong that enables it to strike Israel, and it is essential to note that the North Koreans have their fingerprints all over the Emad.
History of Iranian and North Korean Partnership
The North Korean and Iranian missile partnership has been active since the 1980s when Tehran acquired the Hwasong-5 missile from the DPRK for use in the Iran-Iraq War.
This led to the development and transfer of the improved Hwasong-6 from North Korea to Iran. In the 1990s, the North Korean Hwasong-7, with five times the range of the Hwasong-5, proliferated in Iran. This put American military installations in the Middle East, including the entirety of Israel, within range. The Hwasong-7 could hold more fuel and a bigger payload.
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-my-journey-between-jerusalems?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius.
That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.
It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.
To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies.
What today is Vilnius was once Vilna, a part of the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, and then, between 1918 and 1939, Wilno in the Republic of Poland. The condition of much of the Jewish population was impoverished and insecure. A British member of Parliament who toured the Pale of Settlement in 1903 was appalled by Vilna’s “pestilent” cellars.
Yet the city was also the most important Jewish cultural hub in Eastern Europe—a center of Jewish learning and culture from the 1560s until the 1930s. The greatest Talmudic scholar of the eighteenth century, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, was known as the Vilna Gaon. The man who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, studied in Vilna. That cultural vitality did not abate after the city’s incorporation into the Polish republic. YIVO, the center for Jewish studies that is now based in New York, was originally founded in Wilno in 1925.
In 1939, when Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the city was handed over to Lithuania. This seemed providential. For Jews fleeing Nazi and Soviet rule, Vilnius looked like a sanctuary. Indeed, many of the city’s Jews celebrated the end of Polish rule.
But the celebration was premature. In June 1940, along with neighboring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union. A year later, the regime changed once again—this time fatally.
With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the fate of the Jews of Vilnius was sealed. Between 190,000 and 196,000—more than 90 percent—of Lithuanian Jews were murdered: a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied. Their destruction was swift: Most Lithuanian Jews perished before the end of 1941.
https://www.theblaze.com/return/one-year-after-10-7-israels-alliance-with-a-weakened-america-brings-dangerous-consequences
Betrayed by the United States, Israel will have to maneuver as best it can in a world of diminishing American influence.
“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” said the late Henry Kissinger to William F. Buckley. Israel’s alliance with the United States hasn’t proved fatal — and probably won’t — but it has left Israel with difficult choices and an enduringly dangerous security situation.
Zoom out from the battlefields in Gaza, about the size of Brooklyn and Queens, or the 18 miles from the Israeli-Lebanon border to the Litani River and consider the mess that the Biden administration has made of the world. Israel’s biggest problem is that U.S. influence is imploding around the world and to be an American ally means to wear a target on one’s back. Israel’s second-biggest problem is that its American ally has sandbagged it at every turn.
Instead of peace through strength, Biden has offered promulgation from weakness. That has grave implications for Israel’s position.
October 7, 2023, was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, with 1,200 dead and many raped and tortured as well as 250 kidnapped. Relative to Israel’s Jewish population of 7.2 million, that’s the equivalent of 55,000 Americans, or roughly 20 times the death toll on 9/11.
America’s Global War on Terror caused 900,000 civilian casualties, according to a Brown University estimate. Taking the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS during 2016-2017 killed anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians. Israel’s campaign to extirpate Hamas from Gaza has been measured by comparison.
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/08/kamala-the-tax-cutter-ii-tipp-poll-finds-trump-losing-the-messaging-battle-with-harris/
Of all the results from the latest I&I/TIPP poll, the most unsettling has to be that voters think Kamala Harris is at least as much of a fiscal and economic conservative as Donald Trump.
Our latest poll, taken of 997 likely voters, finds that more voters say they trust Harris (who’s already announced $4 trillion in tax hikes) than Trump to cut taxes by a 48%-45% margin. Among the crucial independent voters, the margin is even greater – 49% to 36%.
That’s not all.
More trust Harris to bring about energy independence, 48%-47%.
Trump is essentially tied with Harris on growing the economy (49%-48%), but he’s far behind with independents on this critical issue, with half saying they trust Harris to grow the economy and just 42% trusting Trump.
Harris is tied with Trump on cutting spending and fixing inflation. But among independents, she leads on the former, 44%-33%, and the latter by a 47%-39% margin.
Two other areas where Trump leads – lowering the national debt (46%-44%) and reducing crime (48%-46%) – are well within the poll’s margin of error.
The only two issues on which Trump holds a clear advantage over Harris are national security (50%-45%) and securing the border (54%-41%).
