• Paper One
For this paper, pay close attention to the following guidelines. Keep in mind, college-level research and writing is a process that takes time, and you will likely need to write multiple drafts of your work to create a quality paper. Allow yourself ample time to complete this assignment to the best of your ability.
1. Select one terrorist organization discussed in our textbook.
2. Go to scholar.google.com and search for that group.
3. Filter your results to show only those works published this year.
4. Select five articles that interest you the most, and read them thoroughly. (You will most likely need to retrieve the articles from EBSCO host.)
5. In a well-written paper, provide the following for EACH article:
o The complete reference for the article EXACTLY according to the APA style guide.
o Explain the problem the author of the article addresses.
o Explain how the author deals with the problem (the author’s methodology).
o Explain the conclusions the author reaches in the article.
6. Papers must adhere to the following guidelines PRIOR to submission on or before the last day of Week 2:
o The first page of your paper will be a cover sheet correctly formatted according to APA guidelines.
o This paper will use 1-inch margins, Times New Roman 12-point font, and double spacing.
o The citations for each article MUST be correctly formatted according to APA guidelines. Do NOT use an automated citation manager to perform this function. Do it manually for this assignment and check your formatting against available APA resources.
o There is no minimum page length for this paper, although requirements 5b-5d should each consist of one COMPLETE paragraph (an introductory sentence, 3-5 sentences explaining key points with citations from the article to support them, and a concluding sentence).
o This paper does NOT require an introductory paragraph, explicit thesis statement, concluding paragraph, or references page.
These are the notes that you can use down below to help you to write this paper above
Right-Wing Terrorism
Right-wing terrorism here refers to political extremists who wield violence to oppose progress and changes in political, economic, and social arrangements.
The Klu Klux Klan (KKK)
• The First Wave
o The KKK was officially founded in 1865 in the southern United States in reaction against the integration of African Americans into mainstream society, starting with the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing slavery.
o The KKK engaged in beatings and lynchings primarily during the cover of night to terrorize and murder African Americans and those who supported African American rights, all in the name of white supremacy.
o This first wave voluntarily dissolved itself in 1872, having achieved the its goals once legislative measures in many areas affirmed white supremacy and institutionalized racial segregation.
• The Second Wave
o The KKK emerged again in the 1920s, for three reasons:
White supremacists feared what appeared to be mounting progress toward equal civil rights for African Americans, and were inspired in part by D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, which glorifies the first wave of the KKK.
Some white northerners were afraid of how waves of African Americans migrating from the south would alter the region’s social and economic status quo.
Some white Protestant Christians were afraid of how new immigrants to the US, who were disproportionately Catholic Christians or Jews, would alter the social and economic status quo of the country.
o The KKK resumed and refined the tactics it found effective during the first wave: terrorizing targeted minorities and those who supported minorities, while exercising a clandestine influence on the legitimate political process and politicians.
o The media’s aggressive reporting on the KKK and the adoption of “unmasking laws” at the state level thwarted the ability of the KKK and its supporters to conduct their activities in secrecy, leading to its drastic decline by the end of the 1920s.
• The Third Wave
o The KKK emerged yet again in reaction against achievements toward political equality secured by the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
o The KKK violently attacked participants in civil rights movements, as well as the members of any minority group the KKK deemed inferior, while actively using the media to spread KKK ideology to a wider audience than before.
o Faced with the initial successes of civil rights movements (in terms of the political process as well as the persuasion of the American public) and an aggressive counterterrorism campaign by law enforcement agencies, the KKK significantly declined in the 1980s and 1990s.
• The Fourth Wave
o The KKK re-appeared in 2008 in reaction to the election of President Barak Obama, which some viewed as confirming the predicted demographic shift toward America becoming a minority-majority country.
o Though the widespread terrorism of prior waves has not yet been seen, the number of KKK-affiliated groups has increased dramatically, with prominent KKK leaders using mass media to organize and disseminate racist ideologies promoting political violence.
Christian Identity and Neo-Nazi Groups
• The philosophy behind the Christian Identity movement is the most elaborated theory among those advocating white supremacy, beginning with the concept that white Christians represent god’s chosen people over all others.
• This theory served as the foundational philosophy for the Church of Jesus Christ/Aryan Nation, which has since devolved into several white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups with most not surprisingly organized as pseudo-religious sects.
• While most of these groups do not openly advocate terrorism, individuals within these groups, believing the white race inherently superior to all others, have committed terrorist acts.
The Patriot and Militia Movement
• The Patriot Movement – also referred to as the Militia Movement – emerged after the Cold War inspired by right-wing conspiracy theories that the so-called ‘New World Order’ constituted an existential threat to individual liberty.
• The movement’s basic philosophy states that the government seeks to exercise intrusive control over peoples’ lives that requires the armed defense of personal freedom, a defense often manifesting itself as offensive attacks against government buildings and officials.
• Most adherents of this philosophy have committed acts of terrorism either as individuals or as small cells, as the most militant wings of the movement have no formal, unified organizational structure.
• The media traditionally refers to acts of violence committed by those inspired by this philosophy as “hate crimes” rather than “terrorism,” although these acts meet the standard for terrorism used in our textbook.
The Surge of the Black Supremacist Movement
• A corollary to the Christian Identity movement is the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which states that whites and Jews constitute an evil threat against people of African descent, who are the real chosen people of god.
• While this movement has not yet committed acts of terrorism in the United States, law enforcement organizations – particularly the FBI – note that its members advocate political violence, have adopted the garb and symbols of a military organization, and have engaged in paramilitary exercises.
Left-Wing Terrorism
Left-wing terrorism here refers to political extremists who advocate the use of violence to achieve fundamental changes in the existing political, economic, and social organization.
The First Anarchists in the United States
• The Anarchist movement took hold in the United States in reaction to perceived social injustices that took place against the working classes during the Industrial Revolution, at which time the shift from a primarily agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy was accompanied by exponential rates of urbanization, as well as the absence of workplace safety standards, labor laws, and social services.
• Anarchists advocated for the abolishment of capitalism and the persecution of those whose wealth derived from capitalist economy activities, which they saw as immoral tactics designed by the bourgeoisie to exploit the working classes.
• While the philosophy behind the Anarchist movement did not necessarily require the use of violence to achieve its goals, violence was often viewed as the only method to do so, soon making the movement – whose acts include the assassination of President William McKinley – one of the principle security threats within the United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
• Following a series of high profile cases leading to the prosecution of Anarchists, government crackdowns on Anarchist organizations, and the adoption of many new laws and regulations that seemingly addressed Anarchists’ key concerns about the exploitation of labor, the Anarchist movement evaporated in the United States.
The Weather Underground
• The Weathermen – later renamed the Weather Underground – adopted Anarchist theories, of which there were plenty, and put them into practice as an organize terrorist movement of the 1960s and 1970s seeking to secure a more just society through political violence.
• Itself a small group primarily composed of well-educated, white, student intellectuals, it often coordinated with other left-wing groups who also advocated the use of political violence.
The Black Panther Party
• The Black Panther Party emerged in the 1960s in condemnation of the perceived oppression by capitalists and corporate power structures of the economically disadvantages classes, which included whites and blacks.
• While the Black Panthers did not view themselves as terrorists, their advocacy of violence as a form of self-defense against their perceived oppressors contributed to several incidents – many of which were provoked by law enforcement organizations – that led them to be considered a terrorist organization.
The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)
• The SLA was a small group of community activists and graduate students who formed the group in the 1970s in order to use terrorism to achieve social justice for racial and economic minorities.
• The group was only involved in a few high profile incidents – including the assassination of a public school superintendent and the kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist’s daughter – before all of its members were either killed in a shoot-out with the police in 1974 or captured.
Single Issue Terrorism
Single issue terrorism here refers to groups or individuals who wield political violence to make one particular political point or to support a platform of closely related political positions.
Antiabortion Violence
Following the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), which affirmed the legal right of women to abortion, some groups and individuals determined that violence was necessary to fight abortion, resulting in a number of lethal attacks against abortion clinics and medical providers ever since.
The Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts
Operating as small, autonomous cells, these two ecoterrorist organizations have engaged in a number of high profile attacks against individuals, organizations, or properties who symbolize the destruction of animals and the environment.
The Jewish Defense League (JDL)
The JDL has sponsored several acts of lethal terrorism in support of the idea of Jewish racial supremacy, especially against Arabs, who are seen as constituting an existential threat to the Jewish people and Israel as a Jewish state.
Puerto Rican Nationalist Groups
Several groups use terrorism against symbols of what they view as the US occupation of Puerto Rico, which these groups believe should be a free and independent nation state.
Ideological Waves
• Whereas left-wing terrorism constituted the largest domestic terrorist threat up until the 1980s, most of these groups have since disappeared, replaced since the 1990s by the growing threat of right-wing terrorists.
• Single issue terrorism (whose manifestations are, as you may recall, often classified as ‘hate crimes’) is the most prevalent form of domestic terrorism facing the United States in the post-9/11 world, as evidenced by the large number of politically motivated attacks leveraging fear and intimidation to dissuade racial, religious, sexual, ethnic, and disabled minorities from increasing their representation in the American community.
Religious terrorism here refers to extremists who wield political violence for the greater glory of a religious faith.
Defending the Faith in the “Cosmic Wars”
• Religiously motivated terrorists believe god sanctions their violent acts and that the terrorists themselves are therefore not morally accountable for the death and destruction resulting from their acts of violence.
• Religious terrorists see the world in black and white: they are wholly correct and good, while their enemies are wholly incorrect and evil.
• There are five reasons why religious terrorists constitute a greater danger than the other types of terrorist groups we have discussed so far:
o Religious terrorists fully embrace a zero-sum struggle in which all nonbelievers are legitimate targets of violence.
o Religious terrorists believe they are following the will of god as a universally supreme being.
o Their belief in a ‘higher law’ – i.e., the demands of god – authorizes them to disregard the legitimacy of civil authority and secular values.
o Their disconnection from the societies they are trying to replace means they have very little restraints on the means they use to achieve their goals.
o They are motivated by a religious interpretation that is intended to appeal to people from many different segments of society, providing them with a decentralized network of support (of varying levels and sympathies).
The Proliferation of Religious Violence
• The distinctions between religious terrorists and other types of terrorists is not always clear, as many religiously motivated terrorists are also motivated by political goals, especially those of nationalism/separatism.
• The analysis of data from the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism clearly indicates a significant increase in religious terrorism since the 1990s.
• Religious terrorism starting in the late 1960s/early 1970s could really be considered the “fourth wave” of modern terrorism, after the Anarchist wave starting in the 1880s, the anti-colonial wave starting in the 1920s, and the “New Left” wave starting in the early 1960s.
• It is important to remember that while Islamic terrorism captures most of our attention during this “fourth wave”, religiously motivated terrorists find inspiration in many different religious traditions, and we can find many examples of modern, active terrorist organizations motivated by religions other than Islam.
Alienation, Humiliation, and Fear
• Religious terrorists of all genres resort to violence in opposition to what they perceive as the intrusive, permissive, ever changing, postmodern world that promotes secularism and, therefore, threatens the existence of their way of life.
• Violence is then adopted, first, as a tactic of self-defense, and, second, as a means of seizing control of society in order to make it into the image of society they wish to promote or preserve.
• The integration of violence as an approach to manage conflict sponsors a division between religious terrorists and the mainstream adherents of their religion, which means that religiously motivated terrorists have more in common with each other than they have with their co-religionists.
The Jihadi Movement and Political Violence
Muslims
• Muslims comprise approximately 1.3 billion people on Earth, but they are a diverse community of various beliefs and practices, about 85% of whom are Sunni Muslims with most of the rest being Shi’a (also written as “Shia” or “Shi’ite”) Muslims.
• By far, the vast majority of Muslims does not agree with militant radical Islamists – either their interpretation of Islam or the means by which they choose to achieve their goals – and view them as terrorists as most non-Muslims do.
Islamists
• Islamists advocate for a society organized and managed according to traditional practices (which they associate with culturally-influenced interpretations of Islamic religious teachings), with varying levels of accommodation for the context of the modern world.
• They believe non-traditional, non-Islamic societies – such as though seen in the Europe and the US – do not facilitate social justice and undermine one’s ability to keep to Islamic practices and beliefs.
• While they do advocate for political reform and social revolution toward their ideas of an Islamic state, only a small minority believes achieving these goals leaves room for the use of violence.
Salafis and Wahabis
• Salafis are the most conservative among the Islamists, pointing directly to their understanding of the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions while allowing the least amount of accommodation for the context of the modern world.
• At the risk of making a vast oversimplification, Wahabis are one of the strictest and most puritanical sects of the Salafis, and Wahabism is the philosophical foundation of many of the most influential clerics in Saudi Arabia.
Jihadis
• Though most Salafis do not agree with terrorism, the most violent and active radical militant Islamist groups – whose members are sometimes referred to as “jihadis” – take inspiration from Salafi theorists.
• Many of the senior leaders within the global jihadi movement ‘cut their teeth’ fighting the Soviets’ occupation of Afghanistan, where many of these jihadis received training and experience in unconventional warfare.
Jihadi Ideology
• Two major scholars appear to exercise the most influence on jihadi ideology:
o Ibn Taymiyya was an Islamic jurist in the 13th and 14th centuries that developed the idea not only that “good Muslims” could use violence against non-Muslim groups who threatened traditional Islamic societies, but also that not engaging in violence against these nonbelievers – or ‘infidels’ – meant that a “good Muslim” was actually a “bad Muslim”.
o Sayyid Qutb was a 20th century Egyptian scholar who divided the world between Islam and “jahiliyya” (the Arabic word for “ignorance”), and members of the Islamic world have a religious obligation to subdue members of the jahiliyya, lest the jahiliyya swallow Islam entirely.
• Many other theorists have contributed to modern forms of jihadi ideology (and yes, there is more than one), but the key element here is that jihadis draw a careful distinction between themselves as “true Muslims” and everyone else, with everyone else (including Muslims who disagree with jihadis) being an enemy that must be destroyed or subjugated, and god authorizes almost any means to achieve this goal.
Homegrown Jihadis in the West – Including the United States
• New generations of jihadis are emerging in Western societies, inspired by jihadi ideology that offers what these jihadis come to believe a solution for their lack of integration into society.
• Of the variables that have been studied, social and cultural disenfranchisement has been identified as the most likely reason why people in Western, liberal democracies are drawn to jihadi ideology, which explains in part why the jihadi movement has not found as much appeal in the United States as it has elsewhere in Europe where cultural groups are not as well integrated into the social landscape.
• The process of indoctrination into the jihadi movement is often referred to as “radicalization”, which has been identified to take place in four stages:
o Pre-radicalization: At this stage, a person lives a generally normal life indistinguishable from the lives of most of us, with no history of violence.
o Self-identification: At this stage, a person begins to feel a sense of disenfranchisement – which can be a result of external factors, such as a sense our society lacks social justice, or internal factors, such as the feeling that they are social outsiders – from the world around them, and start looking for others who share this feeling.
o Indoctrination: At this stage, the people that a person finds during the prior stage begin to teach the person that jihadi philosophies offer a comprehensive solution to all the problems the person feels with the current social arrangement and/or their place in society.
o Jihadization: At this stage – which is the shortest stage – the person’s belief in jihadi ideology translates into violent action whereby the person accepts active membership in a jihadi organization and participates in terrorist activity.
