Obama Stop ISIS.protest.JPG

Hundreds of protestors in Sterling Heights, Michigan, called on President Barack Obama in early August 2014 to help end the killing of Iraqi Christians by ISIS terrorists.

(AP Photo/Detroit News, Brandy Baker )

The Middle East terrorist group that has come to be called the Islamic State took a bloodcurdling turn this week when it beheaded American photojournalist James Foley and circulated a videotape of his slaying.

A rampaging army estimated at 50,000 has left untold numbers of innocent Syrians and Iraqis dead or displaced in the last several months, carnage that has turned the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria into an acronym known around the world: ISIS.

"This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days vision and which will eventually have to be defeated," Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week.

Americans of a certain vintage will find parallels between the doings of the Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorist organization with multiple factions that bombed, lynched and tortured its way across much of America for more than 100 years.

History will show that both terrorist groups claimed they were motivated by a higher power. But at the end of the day, ISIS is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity.

Muslim groups across the U.S. have denounced ISIS.

The Klan and other white-supremacist groups perverted Christianity into a splinter faith called Christian Identity, which holds that Jews are the spawn of Satan and that nonwhites are subhuman.

The Islamic State inspires its followers with a specious, fanatically dangerous form of Sunni Islam to lead a violent religious crusade against Christians and other religious minorities, including tens of thousands of Yazidis forced to flea portions of northern Iraq.

Both of these terrorist organizations wanted to carve out a homeland of likeminded people. The Islamic State calls itself a caliphate. White supremacists sought a whites-only haven in the Pacific Northwest they called the Northwest Imperative.

The soldiers of the Klan, just as those who carry rifles for ISIS today, were poor, disenfranchised and led by powerful zealots.

The Klansmen behind the public murders of many African Americans and the ISIS terrorists who killed James Foley on camera both cloaked themselves in hoods.

Much happened in the last week to give a glimpse of the Islamic State's barbarism, including the murder of Foley, and the official response by the United States.

Let's begin with Jon Lee Anderson's piece in The New Yorker entitled, "The Men Who Killed James Foley." The story begins:

"A video showing the beheading, by a black-garbed executioner, of the American journalist James Foley is the latest in a series of sickening acts that the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, has visited on the world in recent months. Foley's execution was presented as a choreographed 'message to America' by this band of performance-minded terrorists, who seek to be seen, heard, and feared by as many people as possible. Jim Foley, who was forty, was a handsome and quietly intrepid man who reported for GlobalPost, a Boston-based news site. He was in the field in northern Syria when he was abducted, two years ago. He had previously reported on the revolution in Libya, and had spent six weeks in the custody of Muammar Qaddafi's regime after being captured, with several other journalists, on a battlefield in the Western Desert. It was a traumatic experience for Foley and the others, who feared for their lives after witnessing a friend, the South African photojournalist Anton Hammerl, be shot in the stomach and left to die. In the video of Foley's execution, a masked ISIS fighter threatens to execute Steven Sotloff, an American reporter who has written for Time and other outlets, if President Barack Obama does not take the proper "next steps." As proof of deadly intent, the masked fighter drags Sotloff before the camera as well."

For those trying to understand the Islamic State's brutal crusade, the killing of Foley, and what it means to Americans and their security, here are some of the better pieces on the subject:

That's it for this weeks's Spy Games Update, your Sunday morning briefing on national security matters. We'll see you next week.

-- Bryan Denson