The Threat Podcast

On September 30th, a Fly Dubai flight to Tel Aviv with 174 people aboard suddenly plunged more than 17,000 feet. In the cockpit, a 29-year-old Omani co-pilot had attacked the captain with the plane’s crash axe and tried to take control — intending, the UAE says, to crash it into the terminal at Ben Gurion Airport in a suicide attack inspired by 9/11. Passengers and crew overpowered him and the pla...

Three years after Hamas's 2023 attack on Israel, American campuses are still filled with activists making common cause with militant Islamists — and the alliance has moved from the quad into the halls of power, helping elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and propel Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. It's called the Red-Green Alliance: a convergence of the secular far left and poli...

A U.S.-registered company called ETS Solutions North America won a piece of a $2 billion Army combat vehicles contract — testing equipment for a future warfare program. The problem: it shares a founder, an owner, and business ties with a Beijing firm that the U.S. government blacklisted just three months earlier, one whose ownership traces up to China's premier state contractor for rockets an...

Three decades ago, the CIA and French intelligence secretly collaborated to arrest and render Carlos the Jackal — the Venezuelan-born Marxist who became the world's most notorious terrorist — from his villa in Khartoum. He's been in a French prison ever since. Now, drawing on newly obtained intelligence files from the US, Europe, and the former communist bloc — and a rare face-to-face pr...

When ISIS seized Mosul in June 2014 and declared it the capital of their caliphate, a young historian at the university decided someone had to keep the record. For four years he published to the world as "Mosul Eye" — the only independent voice inside the occupied city — while ISIS hunted him and he walked past their fighters every morning. No one knew who he was. Not the journalists in...

In July, a New York jury convicted 28-year-old Hadi Matar of terrorism for the 2022 stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie at a literary festival — an attack prosecutors tied to material support for Hezbollah. The verdict got remarkably little coverage, yet it marks the latest chapter in a saga that began in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death over The Satani...

On July 10th, Spanish police arrested Fergie Chambers — heir to the Cox Enterprises empire, self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, and one of the most prolific funders of radical causes worldwide — while he vacationed with his family in Ibiza. The US wants him extradited. His wife says he's been charged with funding the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, which she denies. And the global left has...

Most people think Al-Qaeda died with the 9/11 era. It didn't — it's arriving exactly where it always intended to go. In Mali, an Al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM has encircled the capital, choked off its fuel supply, and now controls roughly half the country using drones, Starlink terminals, and $50 million ransom payouts. It's on the verge of becoming the first Al-Qaeda affiliate t...

An upstate New York mother of two is arrested for allegedly raising $30,000 for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. American activists travel to Tehran and chant "death to America" on Iranian state TV. A pop-up extremist group called Dample appears online almost overnight — and just as quickly goes dark. How does radicalization move so fast, and who's pulling the strings from abroad? Jay Sol...

A trilateral framework agreement signed by the US, Lebanon, and Israel has done something that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago — and it's put Hezbollah on its back foot. For decades, the group justified its weapons as the only way to push Israel out of Lebanon. This deal flips that logic entirely: it's Hezbollah's disarmament that will restore Lebanese sovereignty and end th...

A man throws a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI's CEO. Gunshots are fired at a lawmaker's house over a data center. Extremist groups with names like the Volcano Group are forming across Europe and Latin America — all united by one thing: opposition to AI and technology. Jay Solomon and Hagar Chemali sit down with Dr. Mauro Lubrano, lecturer at the University of Bath and author of S...

How far is the Chinese Communist Party willing to go to silence critics overseas? In this episode of The Threat Podcast , Jay Solomon and Hagar Chemali speak with pro-democracy activist and Hong Kong Democracy Council Board Chair Anna Kwok about Beijing’s growing campaign of transnational repression. From secret police stations and surveillance networks to intimidation, bounties, and political inf...

As tensions between Washington and Havana escalate, The Threat Podcast examines whether the Cuban regime is facing its most dangerous moment in decades. Hosts Jay Solomon and Hagar Chemali sit down with investigative journalist and ADN Cuba founder Gelet Martinez Fragela to unpack the Trump administration’s growing pressure campaign against the Castro government — including new sanctions, espionag...

On April 26th, 31-year-old software engineer Cole Tomas Allen allegedly attempted to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. Despite having no known history of violence and recently being named “Teacher of the Year” by his tutoring program, Allen reportedly charged toward Secret Service agents armed with multiple weapons before being stopped. In th...

Since the U.S. war on Iran broke out in late February, a rash of terrorist attacks have struck Europe and primarily targeted Jewish communities. Western intelligence agencies believe Iran is likely behind these operations. But London-based counter-terrorism expert, Roger Macmillan, tells The Threat that this network is nearly impossible to track. It’s recruitment and propagandizing takes place thr...

In this episode, we discuss with expert and journalist Hanin Ghaddar the threats posed by Hezbollah - a terrorist group, Iranian proxy, and organized crime syndicate based in Lebanon. Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Her work primarily addresses Shia politics throughout the Levant . and she works closely on Hezbollah. She is the author...

This week on The Threat, Jay and Hagar sit down with Mohsen Sazegara, an Iranian dissident who, in his earlier life, helped create Iran’s most lethal military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a top aid to the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Sazegara described to us how the IRGC grew into a multi-headed “monster”; how Tehran oversees its terror cells in the...

The Threat podcast will analyze and discuss the most pressing, yet not always so visible, threats to global security and the movements and ideologies that fuel extremism and terrorism.