The Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is going through some tough times. Two of the world’s biggest military powers, the United States and Russia, are bombing ISIS in competitive displays of force. The United States is showing off its remote-controlled precision strike drones and, likewise, Russia is showing off its air-force’s capabilities for destruction.
But some claim Russia’s sudden involvement in the Syrian Civil War is part of a scheme by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Allegedly, his plans are to keep the Russian people distracted from the real problems in Russia, Putin’s corrupt government, the aftermath of fueling rebellions in Ukraine, and backwards policies, like the wide-scale destruction of imported food for propaganda purposes.
Has the United States been using this same tactic of distraction on us?
ISIS has been a popular topic at both the Democratic and Republican Presidential Debates. Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle have toted their plans to destroy ISIS, and have openly criticized each other for not taking a tougher stance on ISIS. Donald Trump posted this video to his Instagram account implying that if Bernie Sanders couldn’t defend his podium from a pair of Black Lives Matter protesters, there was no way he could defend the United States against ISIS. Republican politician Mike Huckabee tweeted during the Democratic National Debate, “They [the Democrats] believe climate change is a greater threat than Islamic extremism, that a sunburn is worse than a beheading. It's nonsense! #DemDebate”.
But how big of a threat is ISIS to us, Americans? Statistically, they are almost entirely harmless. According to this article by H.A. Goodman for the Huffington Post, 17,800 people were killed worldwide by terrorists attacks in 2013, and only 16 victims were American. To help put that in perspective, from January to June of this year, we lost 19,000 of our fellow Americans to motor vehicle accidents.
Police forces kill more Americans than ISIS. Americans kill more Americans than ISIS. Skin cancer kills more Americans than ISIS. The United States pours more of our money into our military than any other country in the world right now, we have the world’s biggest navy, the strongest armed forces, top of the line aircraft, etc. and we are fighting a contingency of Mujahideen, armed with just AK-47s and Toyota pick-up trucks, on the other side of the world. They have no chance against the United States, they can hardly fight back against the Kurds and now Russia is taking aim at them, as well.
Why are we so often reminded of the threat of ISIS? Why does ISIS come up so much in our political discourse? It seems painfully similar to how current mass-media operations give mass-murderers the spotlight following an atrocious massacre in exchange for viewers and good ratings. There is some good that comes from this, of course, since it prompts a dialogue about gun control, mental health and wealth disparities, among other things, but this fear-for-interest exchange could be doing our society harm.
Now of course there’s still a chance you could be killed in a mass-shooting by a maniac, or you could be killed by a long-distance follower of ISIS or al-Nusra or the Taliban, but you could also die from a meteorite strike, a falling jet-liner turbine or a sudden massive brain aneurysm, but you don’t let those fears control your life. Similarly, we should not allow our politicians and media to continue playing-up the threat of ISIS and Islamic extremists, and we cannot let them redirect our attention from the global crises we're facing.
