Lone Wolf Terrorism Essay

Words: 1851
Pages: 8

The term terrorism doesn’t have one set definition. For the purpose of this paper terrorism “can include intimidation, assassinations, bombings, hijackings, theft, military-style attacks, kidnappings, and any number of other violent or threatening acts. It may be the intersection of violence with political, racial, ethnic, racial and or ideological purposes” (Alvarez, Bachman, 2017, p. 463). There is a deep-rooted importance in the topic of terrorism; western civilization holds the concept of democracy at a high regard, terror attacks threaten that very democracy. This paper will briefly describe and analyze four terrorist attacks in chronological order. The four terrorist attacks and their dates that will be analyzed are: the terrorist …show more content…
454) has become a primary reason for the spike of terrorist attacks in Europe and North America. It has been reported that in 2006, the majority of the terrorist attacks that have taken place on western soil are classified as lone wolf terrorism. (Alvarez, Bachman, 2017, p. 310). Specially, lone wolf acts are troublesome because they often leave law enforcement agencies in the dark due to the lack of predictability prior to the attack- diff source – sympathizers vs actors who to watch etc. Research has suggested that it takes anywhere from a few months to five years on average for an individual to become radicalized (Klausen, 2016. p. 16). for an individual to be radicalized from the internet and terror propaganda. Per say, there are soft-sympathisers and hard-sympathisers. The soft sympathisers are individuals who support terrorist activity online in a theoritcal sense, but they wont pick up arms, but the hard sympathisers will. Prior to the internet being used as a hub for terrorists, there would be a very limited number of soft sympathisers, because there weren’t the resources, but now there