Stopping ISIS Should Be A Priority
This summer turned out to be a rather bloody one in the United States. With the largest U.S. mass shooting happening in June, emotions and feelings are escalating in our country. But some of them are misplaced, meaning that we are putting efforts into campaigns that are not helping the overall problem. Specifically, the Islamic State (ISIS) associated attack in Orlando and the revitalized and stronger gun control movement.
Although the tool used in this mass murder is a problem and needs to be solved, we must look at the bigger issue: ISIS. Instead of holding sit-ins in our Capitol, we need to talk to other countries at United Nations meetings and other events to find a plan to combat this growing problem.
News outlets across the U.S. have been calling the campaign of terror ISIS is inflicting in the world a “War on the West”. Now we must understand that is an overgeneralization of the actual problem because the small skirmishes we have had do not count as a war on any level. But that doesn’t take from the fact there is a threat growing that we need to stop.
Although this may sound scary, which it should, this isn’t a problem that we need to drop all other issues for. But throughout our history we have been very inward looking. As a case in point, almost every news program’s angle on the Orlando shooting was on gun rights, not on ISIS and its body count increasing in the areas of international terrorism and domestic terrorism.
Most people don’t even know how high ISIS’ body count has risen. At this point they have become an epidemic and a danger to human lives everywhere. According to The Independent Journal, “In 2014, there have been 17,000 civilians killed in Iraq. An estimated 200,000 people have died since the Syrian Civil War.” But the body count does not end there, it gets larger and larger. According to The New York Times, “ISIS was responsible for over half 9,343 killings from January to September in 2014 [and the] total casualty count in Iraq was at least 26,000.”
ISIS has become a stain and problem on a national level. It is time for us as citizens of the United States and as people on this planet to find a way to end the reign of terror that ISIS has begun, to stop the body count from rising every week, month and year.
Devon Cetoute, 17, is a senior at Felix Varela High School. Cetoute is a dual enrollment student at Miami Dade College and is majoring in mass communications/journalism. He plans to be a director for a news program in the future.
