Can the average English-speaker understand HAMAS, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups?

Yes -- just go to the movies.

For Hamas, all you really need to see is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, because Hamas’s tactical approach is body snatching. It stresses body snatching not only as a tactic but as a strategic goal.

Hamas believes snatching bodies, dead or alive, yields strategic gains and material concessions. Whether it is Israelis or Americans, Hamas knows westerners are sensitive to regaining hostages.  Scenes of decapitated prisoners also shock Western governments into concessions.

Now you understand. No need to speak Arabic or to study Islam or to get an intelligence briefing.

To understand terror tactics, to understand just how far a terrorist will go, sit down for a session of video games like Mortal Kombat.  

“Finish him” is the catch-phrase in Mortal Kombat, and also in real life for Hamas, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. They videotape their atrocities.  Calmly recording the slow decapitation of captured journalist Daniel Pearl and others was an ISIS-Al-Qaeda specialty.

Israel has just made available captured Hamas cell-phone messages and “what’s app” videos of Hamas murderers breathlessly calling their parents in Gaza. They brag -- in real time -- how they are shooting and stabbing and decapitating children, women, and the elderly.

“Wish I was there with you,” is the standard Gaza parent’s reply on the captured cell-phone communications.  It’s almost as if they said “Finish them,” as in Mortal Kombat.

Some left-wing Israelis or State Department officials may say that this is only true of Hamas but not of the more “moderate” PLO or Fatah-run Palestinian Authority.

Anyone who has studied the career of Yasser Arafat and his successors knows better. There is a video record of how they trained generations of Palestinians, printed textbooks and ran summer camps to instruct children to kill Jews.

These “Palestinian moderates” still pay bonuses to terrorists and their families.  

There are plenty of video of PLO-Palestinian Authority atrocities including scenes of Palestinian crowds dipping their hands in the blood of murdered Israelis who stumbled into the West Bank town of Ramallah a few years ago.

It should be easy to understand, but actually it isn’t -- for significant parts of the Western public.

When we see movies of atrocities -- bodies dismembered and burned, people blown up -- or when we play video games with similar scenes, we can become callous to the blood-letting.

This is most true on college campuses, for the under-30 generation that has digested horror movies and video games since childhood while getting pro-“resistance” training at leftist schools.

Perhaps this explains why Hamas is more popular in the 18-30 segment of the public and not among older people who recall or studied earlier chapters in our history like World War II or 9/11.

Maybe it’s too late to send some of the younger generation to the bookshelf to do real research on the motives and tactics of various terror groups, particularly of the Islamist variety.

Still, we can show a few movie moments, nothing too taxing, just a short clip from the face-off between a captured space alien and the president of the United States in "Independence Day."

To grasp the zero-sum thinking of terrorists, just consider the dialogue:

PRESIDENT’S QUESTION: “Can There be a peace between us?”   

ALIEN’S  ANSWER:  “NO PEACE!!!”

PRESIDENT’S FOLLOW-UP QUESTION: “What do you want us to do?”  

ALIEN ANSWER: “DIE, DIE, DIE!!!”

You do not need a political science course or a seminar in conflict management and resolution.

It’s not about sharing. It’s not about ceding a bit more territory or changing policies. It’s not about proportionality and international law.  It’s about tribalism. It’s my tribe or yours. Period.

According to a famous Arabic saying -- “Ana wa-ahuya  ‘ala ibn-ami, wa-ana wa ibn-ami ‘ala al-jiran: 

“I and my brother over my cousin, and I and my cousin over our neighbors.”

Hamas, ISIS, Al-Qaeda or PLO basically say “It’s my terrorist tribe, or your namby-pamby civilization.”

The fictional space alien and the real-life terrorist have similar goals.

“We want your planet. We want you dead. We want your country. We want you dead. We want your civilization dead.”

That’s life, not a movie.

Dr. Michael Widlanski is an expert in political communication, a former reporter and college professor who was the author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat (Threshold-Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Can Israel Survive A Palestinian State? (1990). He was strategic affairs advisor in Israel ’s Ministry of Public Security, editing captured PLO documents. Earlier he advised Israeli negotiation teams at the Madrid and Washington talks in 1991-92.  Dr. Widlanski was a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007-8 and at the University of California, Irvine in 2014, taught political communication for two decades at The Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University.  Earlier he was a reporter at The New York Times and Cox Newspapers, war correspondent for  Israeli Army Radio and Diplomatic Correspondent for  Israel Television in English (IBA).

Image: PxHere