Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. It was elected, in free and fair elections, by the Palestinian people in 2006. Comparisons with ISIS are nonsense and merely police state rhetoric. If anyone is responsible for ISIS and Al Qaeda it is the United States. There was no ISIS before the invasion of Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda before the West began funding Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the secular pro-Soviet government there.

During the 1980s the Israeli government was instrumental in creating Hamas, for similar reasons. It wanted a Palestinian counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.

Source: Tony Greenstein’s Blog