Would like to put in a partial defense of Kerry.
ISIS is very bad and I’m all in favor of crushing them, if we can do so without too much trouble. But Kerry was talking about the number of people killed by war and other state and sort-state actions.
That’s a very different question of whether a media-savvy bunch puts a few slick videos online of them doing horrible things. The beheadings so placed are in number I believe still under 100. That’s horrible for the beheaded and their families, but it kind of pales in comparison with the 1980 massacre of Islamists in Hama, with 10,000 to 40,000 dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Hama_massacre
Or the Iran/Iraq War, with 1M to 2M dead. Somewhere around 250,000 of the civilians.
When we rank ISIS as an existential threat, we’re believing their propaganda. They’re an irritant, which will be squashed whenever we decide to do so.
Our problems are not ISIS or Islamists in general, it’s our own increasing tendency towards national suicide.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”
I don’t agree with much of that. ISIS have invaded and taken over much of Iraq, huge chunks of Syria and now in Libya and are taking root. They need to be wiped out.