We still don’t understand what we’re up against.
“I recall one instance where we were ordered to turn over a shipping container of captured Taliban weapons to the Afghan government, and I told the Major in charge of the mission “You know these are going right back to the Taliban as soon as we leave, right?” Without hesitation he responded, “Oh yes, I know.”
This story that Jesse Petrilla tells in If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them’is part of the larger reason why we not only lost Afghanistan, but why we’re losing to Islamic terrorists around the world and at home.
Jesse Petrilla had been an Army Liaison Officer on the ground in Afghanistan and had taken part in the interrogation of Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. He had also witnessed the defeatist politics that foreshadowed the loss of Afghanistan and encroaches on much of civilization.
While Petrilla’s time in Afghanistan is at the heart of the narrative, he moves from Israel to Jordan, visits Egypt, travels to the Balkans and witnesses the incursion of Islam into Europe, and then back home into the United States where he served as an elected official. Along the way he sees Islam in its native environment and in our own, witnesses our growing willingness to appease it and surrender to it, and our refusal to come to terms with what it truly is.
This is an experience that began when he was in Afghanistan and encountered military officers unwilling to understand what they were up against or, like that major, unwilling to rock the boat.
Afghanistan was not lost in any single battle, but in our refusal to understand what we were fighting. And if our civilization falls the way that Constantinople once did, that will ultimately be the tragic epitaph to be carved on its tombstone. In Afghanistan, Petrilla encounters Islam at its most elemental, operating with a heedless disregard for reality and human life, motivated purely by a fiery mix of theological conviction and tribalism. The Muslim terrorists he encountered boasted of their willingness to keep fighting us for generations, even, as in the book’s title, if it takes a thousand years, they were willing to kill, to die and teach their children to kill us.
As Petrilla succinctly observes, “they just want your entire society to submit or die.”
Islam has already fought for more than a thousand years to force all non-Muslims to submit to Islam. It is willing to fight for another thousand years to make slaves of all mankind.
The Koran has a great deal of value, but human life has almost none. Human beings are mere vehicles for imposing Islam or resisting it. Much like the Marxist view of society, individuals don’t matter, only the movements of history do. In that realm, which one of the Afghans he encounters describes as a “planet”, nothing matters less than a man.
Unless it’s a woman or a child.
“I have seen cases where Taliban have fired mortars from the roof of a building full of children, only to run away before the counter- attack in which several children were killed, at which time the Taliban will play to the media and blame the Americans for indiscriminately killing civilians, further eroding our mission,” Petrilla describes in If It Takes a Thousand Years.
Westerners don’t understand Islam. And they try to deal with Islam on American terms.
After the recent anniversary of our retreat from Afghanistan, Petrilla describes a mission rotted from within. As an Army officer, he encountered a translator who supported the Taliban. “To make things even more unsettling, the pro-Taliban translator was an American citizen who held a Top Secret security clearance. I reported him to my superiors, and when they reported it to theirs, making its way all the way up to the General Officer level, they came back to me and said nothing can be done.” It would have been too politically incorrect to get rid of him.
That story casts new light on the recent arrest of an Afghan guard and his family brought to the United States who plotted an ISIS terrorist attack. And on the worthless ‘vetting’ of Afghans.
When Taliban Jihadis were captured, what was done with them?
Petrilla describes how the Afghans were allowed to run review boards during which “59 percent were recommendations for release” while 93% of older Taliban received recommendations for release. Those who remained locked up received average sentences of 4 years. The prisons were known as “Taliban University” for training and indoctrinating the soon to be freed Jihadis.
Nation building subsumed the mission of defeating the enemy until the enemy were in charge.
How could America’s mission in Afghanistan go so wrong? In If It Takes a Thousand Years Petrilla traces the common failures brought on by our inability to understand Islamic societies. Societies where, as he describes in an Afghan wedding, the husband can kill his new bride on their wedding night if she turns out not to be a virgin “and the bride’s family is obligated to replace her with a sister or other female relative at the same wedding.”
Petrilla urges readers to compare that to an American wedding. “Imagine yourself being at a wedding, and after the ceremony having the groom come out of a tent with the bride, murdering her in front of the guests, and then taking her sister and marrying her while the corpse of the murdered bride still lies on the ground.” That is what morality can be in an Islamic society.
As Petrilla travels through the Muslim world, he sees the degraded status of Christians, and as he travels through what used to be the Christian world, he sees our ignorance about Islam.
If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them lays out some of the Islamist organizations, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, corrupting America and western nations, and what we can do about it, but the greatest thing that we can do is look at the horrors of Islamic terrorism and the Muslim world. And imagine.
Americans would rather imagine zombies, vampires and space aliens destroying us than look into the darkness and see what is really waiting for us out there. If It Takes a Thousand Years challenges us to look and to confront the threat that Jesse Petrilla saw in his encounters with hundreds of Islamic terrorists and that he increasingly sees rising in the United States.
Americans could retreat from Afghanistan, but where are we going to retreat to from America?
Tony Rice says
A God forsaken country. Always was and still is, one that persecutes females and men have sex with young boys. How perverted can they get ?
Tony Rice says
How perverted can they get?. Well I suppose that if a mature male has sex with another mature male, they get stoned to death by order of the Quran, but sex by a mature man with a boy is permitted by the Taliban, so are they not well on the road to perversion?
rick says
Of course you are totally correct. But I will offer a reason for this Muslim obscenity. It is all based on their attitude towards women. Women are seen as property not human beings. Their function is to bear children and take care of the home. Other than that, they are prohibited from having a life. They cannot go out without a family male escort. Cannot talk to a man that is not part of the family. They must cover themselves completely so not to be a “temptation” for every other non husband male in the universe. By keeping them at home under the watchful eye of the family, young males have no chance to meet females of a potential marrying age. Don’t forget that 9 years old is marriage material for a female in this G_D forsaken societies. So who can you be seen with or have any intimacy with other than male friends. Strict Islamic societies produce a homosexual paradise. Sex with a young male is the only outlet for another male whose hormones neither respond nor respect Islamic codes of sexual behavior. But don’t call it homosexuality. No it is acceptable because all the females are locked up. and what men did in their teens and twenties continue and when they are old and 65, a young boy makes more sense to them as a sex partner than does a female who is still locked up. A very sick society. And having sex with another male is acceptable if at the same time your family arranges a marriage with a female whom you never met, can be arranged. Sick and nothing less than a perverted society.
H North says
You are correct, Rick, and there’s more to this: in islamic doctrine, males are considered clean, and females are unclean, and valued at half of males (K 2:282). This is why after sex, males are required to ritually “clean” themselves from the filth of the female by fully submerging himself in water. And this is why Taliban compounds have a “tub” just large enough for this ritual. The Tali mindset is, “Why have sex with a female, which allah considers unclean, when another male is clean? Surely, allah will bless me.”
Another example of cultural misinterpretations of Islamic tenets, bent to support homosexuality over heterosexuality, comes from a U.S. Army medic completing a year-long tour in a rural area of Kandahar province. She and her male colleagues were approached by a local gentleman seeking advice on how his wife could become pregnant. When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who allah has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.” (HTT AF-6)
rick says
Amazing. Islam is against even elementary knowledge of the how the advancement of the species is managed. In Islam you can practice homosexuality freely if you follow all the “Islamic rules” but beware you never become a “proud gay” person. It can cause you your life.
I think even if there is an Islamic Reformation which corrects much of this 7th century social norms, they will never admit openly the issue of homosexuality being accepted in their society as long as it is kept under the blanket so to speak. Everything depends on the status of women. That will take decades if not centuries.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
The key thing that needs to happen to non-muslim societies at large is recognize islam as a hostile ideological cult, in the same way it recognized communism during the Cold War and how some countries, like Germany, regard Scientology. Once that’s done, half the war is won!
Given that Western societies, particularly the US, are incapable of regarding religion as evil (apart from pro-Leftist Atheists who do), the effort needs to be on a movement to de-recognize islam as a religion – at least in respect to anything that is holy, sacred or driven by faith, and recognize it for what it is:: an ideological cult, something like a cross b/w communism and David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult. That ought to be the first goal. Even if islam is a religion in the dictionary sense of the word, that perception needs to be undermined if any headway is to be made against it
soda says
Agree Infidel, I think since most people consider Islam to be a religion, they ignore its political side and think it’s harmless.
Also Lefties flag anyone as ‘racist’ if they criticize Islam…however if we were to expose Islam as a fascist political ideology under its thin veil of religiosity then I think many more people will suddenly wake up.
As Leftists are always out on the hunt for Nazis, seeing them were they’re not (the Right)…but if they can see Islam as an ideology on par with Nazism and not an ethnicity or religion, then they’ll quickly wise up and join the anti-Islam movement.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Soda
Rebecca Bynum, one of the original executive staffers at Jihadwatch, wrote a book “Allah is dead: Why Islam is not a religion”. She addresses all the issues involved in recognizing it as one, particularly from the POV of the US constitution, which then arms any recognized religions w/ rights unheard of for other entities
somehistory says
Glenn Beck made that same point a couple of days ago. He was talking about what is happening in America and how Thomas Paine said the nation was to be a “new beginning.” (I trust my memory is correct in writing Paine).
America was a place for people to go (come) to free themselves from tyranny. But, as Beck said, now the only place to go is into space. There is no place left on earth.
The mozlums…bringing tyranny of the worst sort….are here and gaining in numbers and power. And so few Americans….and fewer even of the politicians and media…are willing to admit what mozlums are planning to do, and working feverishly to accomplish.
If this man said on television or at a rally what he wrote in the book…even just a line or two about the mozlums and their weddings…he’d be called every evil name mozlums and their supporters could say, while they lied about their true intent…to make American weddings the same.
and mozlums in gaza and lebanon are doing the same with the making of their own children victims so they can blame Israel for the deaths.
mozlums are evil and they are also cowards. That combination is here…until islam is no more. For mankind to survive, islam has to be destroyed.
James Hoagland says
“Experience is the best teacher” is a well remembered learning from my youth; however just being a straight thinking honest person would be enough to defeat Islam. They are not straight thinking and they are not honest. But logically one must be familiar with the Koran and the Hadith. One should read criticisms of Islam by well informed individuals as Robert Spencer and Shai ben Tekoa. I also recommend Dr. Jay Smith and David Woods.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
“in an Afghan wedding, the husband can kill his new bride on their wedding night if she turns out not to be a virgin “and the bride’s family is obligated to replace her with a sister or other female relative at the same wedding.”
Please cite the Quran passage that allows this.
somehistory says
He wrote “in an afghan wedding.” The afghans seem to do some things not specifically written in their demon book.
Perhaps it will be necessary to buy this book written by the guy who saw it happen.
St Croix says
They might file it under “honor killing” which is real enough all over the Muslim world, and defended in the Koran.
There is an applicable verse Robert Spencer cites often, but I can’t recall it offhand. About it being better to kill your own family member in some cases, than other options, in the form of a story. So saith Mohammed. I’m not exactly sure if its in the Koran or hadith.
Asa walker says
When I have talker to fellow American about the horrors of Islam their eyes glaze over. They just do not want to hear it and they will refuse to see ot until there is blood on their doorstep
St Croix says
Don’t give up. I went through that with my friends a few years back. Some still glaze over. However, some have come onside, and see it for what it is. They also now are prepared to see the persecution of Israel and Jews for what that is as well, and its relation to Islamic ideological ambitions, as well as the Left’s pro-Islam bias, and drive to swamp our own nations with Islamic immigrants.
LytchZam says
I was woefully, embarrassingly ignorant of Islam until I found myself in a position to teach it to California 7th graders. Oh, I knew about the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and Arafat and Clinton. Sort of.
But if you’re going to teach something – even at a seventh-grade level – one should dig deep to prepare for questions from left-field or angry parents asking why I’m proselytizing two (2!) chapters on the subject as required by the California History/Social Science Standards.
So I dug deep. Found this site – others. 20 years later, I might get it, but I understand why almost no one else does – or even wants to know. Speak up and you’re an alarmist, conspiracy nut, xenophobic threat to the peace and platitudes of a ‘civilized society.’ If you know, then you’re morally obligated to do or at least say something, so it’s easier – for now – not to know.
James Lincoln says
LytchZam says,
“If you know, then you’re morally obligated to do or at least say something, so it’s easier – for now – not to know.”
Yes – for NOW.
But deliberate ignorance / willful blindness regarding islam will NOT work in the long run.
Rabbi Menashe Bovit says
Most American naively believe that people regardless of culture think the same way and have the same values. They don’t understand how radically different Muslims think and what their values are. Muslims are aware of this and reflexively employ the technique of “teqiah” fooling the infidel. Leftists though understand Islams hatred for Western civilization, Christianity and Judaism so leftists love Islam.
OLD GUY says
Islamic leaders want only one thing, total rule of the earth. WHY? So they can do what ever they want with no repercussions.
If you want your family to live in a country like most muslim run countries today you’re as crazy as they are.