TOW #13- "Terrorism"

              On an uneventful Saturday morning, I came across a video that popped up on a social media website. Unlike other videos, this one wasn’t about people doing questionable things to follow our society’s standard of being “funny”. It was simply a conversation between a white American and Muslim student, talking about the topic of terrorism during a college class. When the professor told the students that words such as “mercy, peace, and compassion” are mentioned in the Karan 355 times and that Islam is a religion that preaches peace and tolerance, the white American student, just like any other white students would, asked why the world’s most troubled spots were plagued with Islamic terrorism if Islam is a religion that preaches peace. By appealing to logos and pathos, the Muslim student answers this question as well as putting the situation into perspectives.

            The Muslim student starts with the definition of terrorism. Although terrorists are often classified as Muslims who invade different parts of the world to act against other religions, he claims that the world’s biggest terrorists can be the “white superpowers”. He tells the class that everyone around the world knows that the strike of the twin towers killed 3,000 people, but that nobody knows that the bombing of Afghanistan killed more than 15,000 people as 50,000 tons of explosives were dropped onto innocent civilians. The numbers that he presents to showcase his argument stands for itself. It reveals how uninformed people are about the harms that come to the Islamic states from the US and Britain and how dramatized the terrorized events in US can be when comparing the harms that were done of both sides. Then, he continues by stating that overall, 500,000 innocent men, women, and even children were killed in Afghanistan in order to appeal to pathos.

            Finally, when the white student asked, “If Muslims like you feel that way, then why don’t you get out of our country?” he simply replies by saying, “We will… as soon as you promise to leave ours.”

             The Muslim student was effective by appealing to logos and pathos when putting the rest of the students into his perspective when talking about terrorism. I was able to be aware of how uninformed I was and thought his way of portraying his position was very effective.