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Greater Threat to World Peace: America Or ISIS?

by Jessica Blankenship

CampusReform.org recently visited Harvard University to ask students a question: Does ISIS or the U.S. pose a greater threat to world peace? Most of the students' — surprisingly or unsurprisingly, depending on how you look at it — believed that the U.S. was a potentially larger global liability, citing reasons like U.S. protection of foreign oil interests as a catalyst of the regional unrest that leads to so many of the conflicts we later lament.

Here's the thing about this video, and about this question: The minute it's been posed, the person asked already knows that there is only one answer their interviewer is interested in hearing. The people asking the question are only asking it to support a pre-existing and readily apparent hypothesis; the goal is to prove a point supported by the "surprising" answer, that the U.S. is, in fact, a greater threat to world peace than ISIS, which makes it immediately turn into the completely unsurprising answer. Like, we know what these people are going to say before they say it. We know before we even click.

The annoyingly predictable and manipulative nature of this video-survey aside, the thinly veiled agenda of its creators is still a valid argument — American media and the general American mind-set certainly tends to favor a focus on the crimes and threat level of the people who ostensibly pose a threat to our well-being while neglecting to objectively weigh the damage that our choices and actions inflict on the rest of the world. We absolutely don't spend enough time (at least not in a collective, mainstream way) examining the role that our country plays in the creation of conditions and political dynamics that perhaps allow threats to our safety to exist at all. The U.S. is so often like that friend who is constantly complaining about her moody, awful boyfriend but will go off if you even hint that she is even partially to blame for the underlying dysfunction in the relationship. Like, okay cool, you can make him the exclusive bad guy if you want, but if you aren't willing to be brutally honest with yourself about how your habits and flaws keep getting you into these conflicts, they're just going to keep happening, with this boyfriend or the next one.

So anyway, yes, there is a good point to be made in this video, and these Harvard students – even in all of their mildly annoying, collegiate self-righteousness – make that point pretty well.

Image: Getty Images