Okay, I confess that prior to the Paris attack, I had paid little attention to the terror gang known as ISIS. I was aware of the Syrian civil war, what our government was saying and doing, and what the Russians were saying and doing. And while I probably had a better grasp of the refugee situation than many low-information voters or Fox viewers, I had not bothered to go any deeper into the weeds of who or what ISIS was, or what they wanted.
When I did want to learn more about ISIS, I turned to the expert recommended by Zach Beauchamp at Vox. William McCants is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. According to the rest of his biography at the Brookings Institution:
He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He is the author of "Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam" (Princeton University Press, 2011) and ”The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State” (St. Martin's Press, 2015).
Zach Beauchamp interviewed McCants on the day after the Paris attacks for Vox. Cautiously discussing the possible reasons for the Beirut attack, the bombing of the Russian airliner, and the Paris attacks, McCants told Beauchamp that:
These attacks together, he says, suggest that ISIS is lashing out. It's been losing territory in Syria and Iraq, and this might be a response — an effort to deter further intervention against it by showing foreign powers that they'll pay a price.
In addition to writing books and his work at the Brookings Institution and Johns Hopkins, William McCants is also the founder and co-editor of the website Jihadica: Documenting the Global Jihad. In his spare time, he likes to get back to his “hobby, writing a scriptural history of the Qur’an.”
And, in one of those karmic coincidences, he has also just published his latest book on the Islamic State.