Drone strikes: a necessity or simply barbaric?

For years countries upon countries have bombed the innocent civilians of the Middle East with the well-rehearsed excuse of ‘destroying the terrorist threat’. However, in reality, who are the victims of these drone strikes? How many terrorists are actually being killed? Are our bigoted, xenophobic and Islamophobic notions of the Middle East interfering with our ability to acknowledge the unnecessary bloodshed? 

Year after year, the strikes on the Middle East and Western Asia, namely Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, have proven to be futile, having primarily resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. Recent statistics show that almost 90% of men, women and children killed were not confirmed terrorists, but harmless people, whose only crime was living in, so-called, ‘terrorist-infested’ countries. Does nationality, religion and wealth create large enough disparities between human beings that we believe our lives have more meaning and worth?

According to the main-stream media the answer would be yes. Those who practice different religions, have different cultures to us are seen as ‘primitive’, and they aren’t afraid to feed you these stereotypes on a daily basis. As a matter of fact many of these major media-outlets benefit from the complete ignorance of the vast majority of the population. In order for them to maintain our naivety they focus on the seemingly ‘fundamental’ topics to human existence, such as: Kanye West, Donald Trump, Hollywood Break-ups; you know, the necessities.

In fact, the majority of these media outlets believe that the hundreds of innocent slaughtered yearly won’t get them enough ratings, but when they do bother to enlighten us on topics that aren’t celebrity related, they are shocked at how these ‘savages’ could possibly hate us. The animosity certainly had nothing to do with the constant killings of hundreds upon thousands of civilians. Apparently it’s difficult to comprehend that by continuing these erratic strikes, Western nations aid the cause of the very same terrorists we are attempting to eradicate. All they are in fact doing is creating more enmity between the western civilizations and the citizens of these countries. Surely, those killed are someone’s children, siblings, spouses, friends; isn’t it simply human nature for one to seek revenge after their loved ones are slaughtered? However, we are utterly shocked that these people, in turn, want to kill us; ‘What could we have possibly done to anger them?’ Our fear and hate towards them, in reality, originate from our ignorance of their situation.

I am not attempting to create any justification for the radical actions committed by terrorist organisations, but I am attempting to shed light on their reasoning, a reasoning that surely we can all relate to. Certainly there are alternative methods to cope with this loss, however are we so different to them for accepting the deaths of thousands with the same old excuse of ‘destroying the terrorist threat’, when only 10% of those killed are real terrorists?

Many claim that we need to strike back with more power and more fury, however is that truly the case? With power and fury comes imprecision, with imprecision come more deaths of the innocent and from that only terrorism can arise. Aimlessly striking unverified terrorists has proven to achieve nothing, only through educated future generations and striking the confirmed terrorists can this war truly be ended. Education plays a substantial role in human existence, without informing our youth on the ignorance in stereotyping and discriminating, pointless wars between our nations will perpetuate until the end of human kind.