What Does Hamas/ISIS (Really) Want?

Hint: It’s not liberation for the citizens of Gaza. Like ISIS, Hamas is your basic doomsday cult.

U.S. Ambassadors Sheba Crocker and Michèle Taylor joined the Ambassador of Israel and members of Geneva’s international community in front of the United Nations to show solidarity with Israel and to condemn the appalling Hamas terrorist attacks. (U.S. Mission Photos: Eric Bridiers)

The many violent and barbaric acts perpetrated by ISIS, and often filmed by its terrorist members, received a good deal of attention from global media outlets a decade ago. Mass murders, slavery and human trafficking, beheading videos, burning victims alive; no level of brutality seemed beyond ISIS.

The question of why ISIS jihadis resorted to such shocking levels of violence — the reasons as understood and believed by ISIS members — was rarely mentioned.

Of course, there never is, never was, any excuse for terrorism, mass murder, and genocide. The perpetrators of such acts have reasons — insane as they are. The better we understand those reasons, the better prepared our defenses are likely to be.

Understanding ISIS wasn’t difficult. At the height of its power, ISIS had a recruiting website, complete with a detailed list of its plundered military resources and their provenance — mostly ordinance discarded by Russia and the U.S.

ISIS even published a magazine.

In March of 2015, Graeme Wood laid it out in an excellent think piece for The Atlantic entitled “What ISIS Really Wants”.