Terrorism in the West

Instructions: Before you write your initial discussion posts, make sure to read the listed readings, watch videos, and otherwise familiarize yourself with the material posted within Module 3. Your initial discussion posts should be substantive, addressing the question thoroughly. I am not too concerned with word count, but from experience, you will write at least 400-500 words to answer the question sufficiently. You will refer to course material in your initial posts by including in-text citations. This lets your peers and I know you have engaged with the carefully selected material for inclusion in our class topics. In addition to your discussion post, you are engaging with at least two peers. To foster a collaborative learning environment, we should aim to submit our work promptly (before the last minute) and reply to our peers. I hope you find this activity helpful in your learning! Please also remember that if something is not working well, contact me, and we will work on doing things differently.

In your first discussion for the week, you will examine extremism and terrorism in the Western world. As you dive into this topic, you are encouraged to check out the two PPTs I have attached within Module 3 for extra content and contextual evidence! You will discuss the differences between what we call far-left extremism/terrorism and far-right extremism/terrorism. These two ideological leanings are vastly different, as followers will perceive the world around them differently. In general, in the Western world, far-left extremists will seek to correct social justice injustices and environmental concerns and are often very critical to operations by states and governments. Far-right extremists are motivated by extreme nationalism and exclusion of marginalized individuals. In recent years, we have also seen the rise in the trend of “salad bar terrorism,” where perpetrators sort of pick and choose different ideologies that might not actually “belong” to either far left or far right politics. You may ask: how do we connect these ideologies to online behavior and violence? As we are getting to in this course and by the examples you find about extremism leading to violence, it is safe to say that extremism online is fueled by Internet culture, memes, and the pervasive threads of misogyny (check out PPT slides), anti-Semitism, QAnon-like conspiracy theories, and anti-LGBTQ propaganda, which are all part of the online consumption habits of modern violent extremists.

For your discussion, please answer the following prompt:
Open https://chatgpt.com/ and ask the bot a question based on information and knowledge from this week’s material about far-right or far-left extremism and terrorism. Make sure to state the question you asked in your discussion post. Then, critique the answer you got by including information from the sources in Module 3 under “Terrorism in the West.”