From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, you didn't have to be in Belgium to feel the reverberation of bombs in Brussels.

British Prime Minister David Cameron. These were attacks in Belgium. They could just as well be attacks in Britain or in France

or Germany or elsewhere in Europe and we need to stand together. And French Prime Minister Manuel

Valtz said Europe's very survival is at stake. It's another war because terrorism, this terrorism,

Islamic State, wants to destroy us. It wants to destroy men and women.

We've seen it. Writing in The Guardian this week, French journalist Nicholas Hennon criticized world leaders for depicting the challenge posed by ISIS this way.

Quote, if we adopt a militaristic warlike vocabulary, there'll be no way back from that.

We will only strengthen our enemies, he wrote.

Hannan should know, in 2013, while reporting in Syria, he was kidnapped and held hostage by ISIS for nearly a year.

He shared a cell with James Foley, Stephen Sotloff, Peter Kasig, and more than a dozen other

Western captives. Mohamed Mwazi, better known as Jihadi John, an oft-videoed executioner, was one of

his jailers. After Henan's release, filled with what he called accidental knowledge of jihadism, he wrote

Jihad Academy.

In the book, he punctures Western conventional wisdom about ISIS and the Syrian conflict

and lays bare what he sees as our deadly misperceptions of ISIS.

Nicholas, welcome to On the Media. Thank you.

So, you essentially make the argument that the West, and particularly the Western media,

buy into the myths that ISIS is selling, right?

Let's go through some of them.

A big one has to do with the relationship between the Syrian regime and ISIS.

That the government...

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