Research Paper on:
Political Debate and the Impact of Terrorism

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
one in recent months has been in the area of political debate. This paper discusses why political debates are different now after the impact of September 11, and in  what way this has affected debates between political opponents. A LOOK AT TERRORISM In reality there is no one definition of terrorism. This is what makes fighting terrorism  so difficult -- there is a saying that "One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter" (Ganor, PG, 2002). It goes without saying that terrorism is usually what attacks  on our own country are considered, while what we do to others is a result of a prior action taken against us, the United States. But to actually define  it more thoroughly, we can look at the book by Schmidt and Youngman entitled Political Terrorism, in which the authors listed "109 different definitions of terrorism, which they obtained in  a survey of leading academics in the field. From these definitions, the authors isolated the following recurring elements, in order of their statistical appearance in the definitions: Violence, force (appeared  in 83.5% of the definitions); political (65%); fear, emphasis on terror (51%); threats (47%); psychological effects and anticipated reactions (41.5%); discrepancy between the targets and the victims (37.5%); intentional, planned,  systematic, organized action (32%); methods of combat, strategy, tactics (30.5%)" (Ganor, 2002, PG). By taking a closer look at the above percentages we can see that each of  these can affect political debates in some way. While certainly talk of terrorism and tactics regarding Homeland Security are the subject of political debates, we cannot overlook the fact  that actually having two prominent political speakers on stage in one place, along with their audience, is now a prime target for a terrorist attack. It is just such