Terrorism is nothing new. Americans like to pretend that it only happens here, but the fact is that it’s a global problem. Early this month, The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, captured a crashed Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, and burned him alive on film. Fox News released this video on their website and has stirred up some controversy over whether or not they should have done it.
Now I am never one to side with Fox News on anything, but I strongly believe that they made the right choice showing this. Of course the video is extremely graphic, but I think the public needs to be aware of exactly what ISIS is doing. Just reporting the deaths of these people is not enough, showing the actual video makes the threat real, as opposed to just another news segment to be forgotten in a day. It shows that ISIS is more than just a threat to the west, but a threat to the entire world.
ISIS carry out some of the most gruesome attacks. In the past couple of months, this group has taken over multiple villages and strategic points in Iraq and Syria, and has executed numerous journalists on camera in an attempt to rile up a response from the world.
The Nazis are known throughout the world as the epitome of evil. The Concentration camps they ran during the Holocaust are seen as the greatest act of Terror the world has ever seen, but it wasn’t always like that. The United States had always had a general idea of what was going on there, but there was no evidence for them to act upon besides the Nazi conquest of Europe.
It wasn’t until 1944, nearly 10 years after the Holocaust began, and that we discovered an actual camp and brought the evil that was the Holocaust into the public eye, making it real. People tend to only believe what they see, and since we didn’t see anything until 1944, we didn’t believe it. Not to mention the countless other genocides that barely get mentioned in American textbooks.
We in America have a tendency to assume that acts of terror only happen to us. We remember every act of terror that has occurred to us, yet seem to ignore it when it happens to the rest of the world. In early January, the Nigerian militant group, Boko Haram, attacked a Nigerian city and killed nearly 2,000 people. But was it heavily covered in the news? No. The killing of 12 French journalists was. Now, I’m not saying the lives of the French journalists don’t matter, but what I am saying is that people deserve to see the terror happening in 3rd world countries, which is almost always more gruesome than anything we have seen.
So I commemorate Fox News for this. Not only are they exposing ISIS’ threat to the world as a real concept, but also they are showing that it isn’t only Americans facing this threat. If anything it creates unification between countries, fighting together against a greater evil. The only way for people to realize the threat, is to show them the threat and Fox News was one of the only stations brave enough to do it.