The Long Brief: The Jihadist Continuum
Why Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, and “moderates” belong in the same system
Shalom, friends.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a steady stream of emails that all circle the same frustration.
Some come from readers who follow Israel but aren’t well versed in the real operating system—just what filters through the media. A few come from Jewish readers who tell me, quietly, that they’re tired of hearing October 7 described as an “escalation” rather than an intention.
The questions are remarkably consistent.
“Are Hamas and ISIS actually that different?”
“Why does Hezbollah get treated as political while ISIS is treated as theology?”
“Why does ‘moderate Islam’ never seem to moderate the outcome?”
“And why do Western explanations keep collapsing the moment reality intrudes?”
This Long Brief is my answer to those questions.
Not as a catalog of atrocities. Not as a moral performance. Not as a debate about intentions. Just my attempt to map the system underneath the violence—the shared logic, doctrine, and incentives that link actors Western discourse insists on treating separately.
You know that jihadi violence is real and you already know the headlines. Let’s try to understand why the same analytical failures keep repeating, regardless of which group is in the news.
If you’ve ever felt that our language about jihadism keeps changing while the outcomes stay the same, this brief is for you.
Jihadism as a Civilizational System
We aren’t going to inventory the atrocities. The bodies are already counted.
Jihadism is a civilizational project—not the string of isolated malfunctions the news might have you believe. Nor is it a mood, a grievance stack, or a sociological tantrum. It is a coherent ideological enterprise that understands itself as world-ordering. Its end state is explicit: Islamic rule enforced by sharia, culminating in submission.
The caliphate mindset is not metaphorical. Jihadist movements describe their mission with clarity Western journalists analysts often refuse to hear. They speak of a single goal rooted in Islam itself: global dominion under divine law. It is simply the continuation of a long tradition of religiously sanctioned empire. A century ago, Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi stated the premise plainly: Islam seeks the earth in its entirety, not a negotiated portion. That logic did not expire. It metastasized.
Understanding jihadism at this level requires abandoning several habits that have repeatedly produced strategic failure.
The first is compartmentalization. Western policy culture treats Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and aligned state actors as discrete problems with local etiologies. Each is given its own peace process, its own euphemisms. This approach mistakes symptoms for unrelated diseases. The ideological bloodstream connecting these groups is ignored because acknowledging it would require confronting Islam as a political theology rather than a private spirituality occasionally hijacked by madmen. And let’s face it, there’s too much money to be made by appeasing them. But at what cost?
The second habit is theological denial. Western leaders have spent decades insisting that jihadist violence has nothing to do with Islam—even as jihadists saturate their rhetoric with Quranic citation, hadith, and juristic precedent. It would be laughable if it weren’t quite so dangerous. From post-9/11 assurances that “Islam is peace” to later claims that ISIS is not Islamic, this posture has been less about accuracy than comfort. It contradicts the enemy’s own explanations of himself. When a movement grounds its violence in scripture, law, and prophetic tradition, dismissing that claim is not tolerance. It is analytic malpractice. It is, frankly, suicidal.
The third error is tone-based moderation. Movements that trade fatigues for suits, or suicide vests for ballot boxes, are granted the label “moderate” so long as they speak politely and condemn rival factions. Doctrine becomes secondary to optics. This is how explicitly Islamist movements committed to sharia governance are described as secular simply because they participate in elections or speak the language of diplomacy. The terror group Muslim Brotherhood has benefited most from this laundering. Its texts and offshoots aim for the same end state as more openly violent actors.
Let’s reject the fiction that these distinctions are morally or theologically meaningful.
Across the spectrum, jihadist actors share a common ideological core. They differ in organizational form, sponsorship, and tactical patience. Some operate as insurgent networks. Others function as proxy armies for state patrons. Some revel in spectacle. Others prefer deniability. None of this alters the underlying creed.
Counterterror analysts have long acknowledged that despite tactical variation, these movements pursue the same objective: an Islamist order governed by what they define as God’s law, advanced through jihad (so called “holy war”) against perceived enemies of Islam—the West especially. Israel might be the “little Satan” but the United States is the “big Satan.”
The beheading video and the policy platform sit on the same continuum. One communicates through terror theater. The other through institutional capture. Both want you dead.
Western governments have occasionally gestured toward this reality—though generally they hedge their terminology out of cowardice. When disparate groups are named together as a single threat set, it reflects a belated recognition that nationalist branding does not negate ideological alignment. The banners change. The engine does not.
Western discourse still resists logic—perversely becoming victimized by language. No one wants to be “Islamophobic,” right? A phobia is an irrational fear. It’s not irrational to fight for your culture and to deny an enemy from murdering you.
Contrary to “polite” Western discourse: Poverty does not drive jihad. Education does not inoculate against it. Data repeatedly shows that recruits are often educated and economically stable. The claim that jihadists are hijacking an otherwise peaceful faith collapses under the weight of canonical sourcing. These movements do not invent their justifications. They cite them. And when Muslim actors speak candidly among themselves, the language is not about root causes or cycles of violence. It is about honor, faith, and inevitability. That gap between internal discourse and external presentation is strategic and you would be a fool to believe it.
Occasionally, a regional leader breaks the script. When Egypt’s president challenged clerics at Al-Azhar to confront the theological problem directly, he was acknowledging what polite Western forums avoid: that the doctrine itself requires interrogation. Such statements are rare precisely because they expose the scale of the problem. Other religions had their… more extreme days, but moderated. Islam has not had that transition period yet. Let’s hope they do, but for now we must not let our glasses be fogged. We must look at this as a real threat. Because it is.
What “Jihadist” Means in Its Own Grammar
Jihadist is not a journalistic smear or a lazy synonym for “bad Muslims.” We are using this term the way the movements and clerical ecosystems around them use it: as a legal-theological category with a long paper trail—text, precedent, and a lot of blood. Far, far too much.
Strip the theology out of jihad and you do not become nuanced. You become ignorant.
Start with the boring part, because the boring part kills. The Arabic root j-h-d means “to strive.” Everyone knows that fact, and it gets weaponized into a hall pass. In the classical legal tradition, jihad is not a motivational poster. It is a doctrine with subcategories, rules, conditions, and consequences. Across the major Sunni legal schools, the central operational meaning remains armed struggle in the service of expanding or defending Islamic rule. And to be clear, not every Muslim is a jihadist. Our issue is with those trying to forcibly make us submit to Islam or die. The term jihad has a definable content, and jihadist movements are not making it up as they go along.
The canon they cite is not obscure. Quranic commands to fight until submission, and to impose a subjugated status through jizya, sit at the core of the legal conversation. Hadith literature adds the propulsion: Muhammad’s reported command to fight “until” confession of faith, the repeated promise of paradise attached to armed struggle, the sanctification of violence as worship. Jurists then do what jurists always do: they systematize. They argue over thresholds, exceptions, authority, timing. They do not argue that armed jihad is meant to be symbolic. They merely debate its administration.
This is why the modern Western habit of calling jihad “really about inner struggle” does not function as coherent analysis— though it functions as public relations. The famous line about returning from “lesser jihad” to “greater jihad” is commonly treated as a cornerstone in Western sermons and interfaith panels. In the mainstream hadith tradition it is weak at best, and it does not sit in the primary Sunni collections. Meanwhile, armed jihad appears repeatedly across the Quran, hadith, and the legal manuals with granular detail about permissible targets, protected categories, taxation, slavery, and the status of conquered populations. The “spiritual jihad” framing is not the tradition’s center of gravity. It is the modern attempt to move the furniture because the room is morally radioactive.
Here is the hard point that Western discourse keeps refusing to touch: modern jihadist movements operate inside the inherited tradition, not outside it.
Islam has no central magisterium. There is no single authority that can excommunicate a movement and make the label stick everywhere. Authority is argued through text, precedent, and the credibility of scholars. That structure creates a permanent vulnerability: a movement with enough textual literacy can quote its way into plausibility. ISIS did not enslave Yazidi women because it had a sudden, innovative burst of barbarism. It argued its program by citing sources about captives, concubinage, and war booty that exist in the tradition and were treated as law in long stretches of Islamic history. You can call this evil without blinking. You should. It is. But calling it “not Islamic” is a maneuver lacking a foundation in reality. It is an attempt to salvage a comforting picture by moving the boundary line around the crime scene.
Listen to how these actors talk when they are not auditioning for Western journalists. They are crystal clear: Jihad as obligation rather than reaction. Jews as theological enemies, not just political opponents. Territory framed as inalienable Islamic trust. Violence framed as purification. Defeat treated as temporary and victory as guaranteed.
Hamas’s own founding texts invoke end-times traditions about war with Jews. ISIS’s propaganda blended genocide with eschatology and called it destiny. Hezbollah’s founding worldview ties obedience to Iran’s Supreme Leader to religious duty, not mere alliance management.
This language is not metaphor. It is mission definition.
Modern apologetics—Muslim and Western—typically relies on three evasions. One: contextualize violent texts into irrelevance by claiming they only applied to narrow historical moments, even as jurists spent centuries universalizing principles. Two: redefine jihad as ethics by elevating minority spiritual readings and treating the legal corpus as an embarrassing relic. Three: collapse doctrine into grievance, insisting everything is colonialism, poverty, or humiliation, even when jihadist movements explain themselves in religious-legal terms and often recruit educated, economically stable adherents. These moves are political survival strategies inside a liberal order that cannot metabolize a rival civilizational claim.
If jihad is simply “extremism,” then therapy and social work become the solution set. If it is mainly “grievance,” then money, concessions, and international conferences become the ritual. If it is merely “terrorism,” then policing and point-targeting are enough. Sure enough, those tools may have a place. They are not the whole map.
Treat jihadism as an ideological-imperial operating code—one that can animate states, militias, parties, and charities in different proportions—and the strategy changes.