COMPREHENSION CHECK

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 478.

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

1. universally accepted definition

2. a philosophy of coordinated violence

3. an established social order

4. to be inflicted by

5. to intimidate or coerce a government

6. illegitimate use of force

7. to gain a political or tactical advantage

8. to provoke fear and intimidation

9. to attract wide publicity

10. to cause public shock, outrage, and/or fear

11. to exterminate

12. a subsequent destabilization of the economy

13. to be classed as commit terrorism

14. ethnic cleansing

15. commit racial hate crimes or gay-bashing

16. often-random choice of targets

17. politically convenient

I. Answer the following questions to check how carefully you have read the texts:

1. What does the definition of terrorism consist of?

2. What definition of terrorism is given by British Terrorism Act 2000 and Current US national strategy?

3. What are further criteria that are sometimes applied to this definition?

4. What excludes such criteria as Target Objective Dominance?

5. What actions, according to the Terrorism Act 2000, are considered to be acts of terrorism?

6. What is the difference between terrorism and other kinds of coordinated violence?

7. How can the notion “terror” be defined in the framework of social order?

8. What is the tendency to use the term ‘terrorism”?

9. Does Chomsky agree that "terrorism" is used to describe a type of behavior?

10. Have the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" lost any distinction with other political terms in post- 9/11 Western society?

11. How do you understand the statement “the label of 'terrorism' is a powerful political weapon”?

12. Dwell on the main principal ingredients that are common to all forms of contemporary terrorism.

II. Now decide whether the statement is true or false; correct those that are wrong:

1. Terrorist violence may be perpetrated by rebels in opposition to an established social order or it may be inflicted by a state upon its own citizens or those of another state.

1. Walter Laqueur: "Terrorism constitutes the illegitimate use of force to achieve a political objective when guilty people are targeted."

3. The Holocaust and other cases of genocide, which are undertaken to intimidate not to exterminate, and which are usually hidden rather than publicized.

4. Some, particularly political conservatives, claim that acts of "revolutionary" violence cannot be considered terrorist in nature.

5. Terrorism can loosely be defined as the use of violence to bring about a change in a particular social order.