Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington with two transparent objectives on his agenda. First, of course, is to secure his reelection back home. The second, aided and abetted by Republicans (and many Democrats) in Congress, is to torpedo a potential deal over Iran's nuclear program. (Should he succeed in scuttling the P5+1 negotiations, Netanyahu will have only increased the chances of an unfettered Tehran building nuclear weapons or facing a preventive war with dubious prospects for stopping it.)
But when he appears before Congress on Tuesday, Bibi will have one other mission, this one rhetorical. Netanyahu will continue his campaign to conflate all Islamic militant groups--Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, and Iran-- into the same single, shared threat facing Israel and the West. That his assertion is utterly--and dangerously--wrong won't stop Benjamin Netanyahu making it.
Max Fisher of Vox ("Hamas is not ISIS. Here's why Netanyahu says it is anyway.") highlighted Bibi's semantic trick after the brutal beheading in August of American journalist James Foley. After ISIS posted the video, the Israeli Prime Minister took to Twitter with a post of his on:

"RT THIS: Hamas is ISIS. ISIS is Hamas. They're enemies of Peace. They're enemies of all civilized countries," the tweet read, along with images of the ISIS beheading video and of a 2012 incident in which Hamas members dragged a Palestinian behind a motorcycle in a gruesome punishment for "collaborating" with Israel.
The tweet was deleted, but replaced by another with the ISIS flag where Foley's execution had been. Netanyahu then used the phrase -- "Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas" -- in two public speeches, first at a Saturday news conference with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and again at a Sunday cabinet meeting.

As Fisher explained, that the two organizations appear on the U.S. list of terror groups "does not make them at all linked, much less identical." Hamas is first and foremost a Palestinian nationalist group, one backed by Syria and Iran. ISIS, on the other hand, isn't just a Salafi-inspired jihadist movement birthed from Al Qaeda in Iraq. As it turns out, both Shiite Iran and Alawite-controlled Syria are actively engaged in battling ISIS. Right now, Iraqi forces backed by Shiite militias led by Iranian General Qasem Soleimani of the Revolutionary Guards are engaged in an offensive to eject ISIS from Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. It's no wonder that Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal "publicly rejected any Hamas-ISIS comparison."
But Netanyahu was only getting warmed up. Addressing the United Nations the next month, Netanyahu declared that ISIS--that toxic blend of former Saddam loyalists, Sunni fighters from Iraq and Syria, and foreign jihadists dating back to Al Qaeda in Iraq--was cut from the same cloth as the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran. After proclaiming that "ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree," Bibi declared:

Imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic State, ISIS, would be if it possessed chemical weapons. Now imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of Iran would be if it possessed nuclear weapons.
Ladies and gentlemen, would you let ISIS enrich uranium? Would you let ISIS build a heavy water reactor? Would you let ISIS develop intercontinental ballistic missiles? Of course you wouldn't. Then you mustn't let the Islamic state of Iran do those things either, because here's what will happen. Once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charms and all the smiles will suddenly disappear. They'll just vanish. And it's then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.

In Netanyahu's conflation project, it's 1938 all over again:

The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree about who among them will be the master of the master faith. That's what they truly disagree about."

And by "them," Bibi means Shiite and Sunni, friends or foes, anywhere in the world. And the threat they pose:

It's not militants. It's not Islam. It's militant Islam...Because their ultimate goal is to dominate the world.

And just in case anyone missed the point, the Likud leader repeated, "So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas."

And what they share in common, all militant Islamists share in common: • Boko Haram in Nigeria; • Ash-Shabab in Somalia; • Hezbollah in Lebanon; • An-Nusrah in Syria; • The Mahdi Army in Iraq; • And the Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere.

In January, Prime Minister Netanyahu also tried to appropriate the terror attacks at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher deli in Paris. But Bibi didn't just opportunistically tell French Jews that "Israel is your home" (as he would again after the violence in Copenhagen). Netanyahu lectured EU leaders frustrated with Israel's settlement expansion that with him they are all in this together:

There was a great deal of significance to what the world saw, the prime minister of Israel marching together with all leaders of the world in one effort against terrorism, or at least a call to unite against terrorism.

Who knew that France, Germany, the UK and other European countries confronting large and isolated Muslim populations resulting from post-colonial immigration or guest worker program needed to stand with Benjamin Netanyahu to keep Judea and Samaria inalienable parts of Greater Israel?
Given Israel's growing isolation over its occupation of the West Bank and the fading hopes of Palestinian statehood, you can't blame a brother for trying. Bibi needs his equation (Hamas=ISIS=Iran=Al Qaeda=Hezbollah=Al Shabab, etc.) to be true. But back in Washington, Republicans want it to be true. That way, they can declare that President Obama is "weak" in refusing to confront and wage war on "radical Islam." As Senator John McCain (R-AZ) put it two weeks ago:

"The notion that radical Islam isn't at war with the West is an ugly lie."

Like most of his fellow Republicans, McCain isn't much more specific about whom Americans should fear most or fight hardest against. As Mitt Romney, the man McCain vanquished for the GOP nomination in 2008, put it eight years ago, the short answer is everyone, everywhere:

"But I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another. This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."

Somewhere, Romney's "close friend" Bibi Netanyahu was smiling. Just like he will be when says pretty much the same thing on Tuesday to the Congressional Republicans who invited him to mislead the American people.