The first five chapters of Bruce Hoffman’s book was interesting because we got to see him attempt to do something that has never been done before, which is attempting to end the semantic controversy over the term terrorism. The first chapter of the book “Defining terrorism” begins with Hoffman addressing how the term has evolved over the past two hundreds years. Within the first chapter of the book Hoffman establishes the most common term frequently associated with terrorism: “Violence”, “Political”, “Fear”, and round out the top three having the highest frequency along with other words such as “Publicity”, “Symbolic” and “Coercion” (P.34). After thoroughly analyzing the meaning of terrorism, Hoffman “attempts to define terrorism as the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change” (P. 40). Hoffman’s definition of terrorism, falls short in my opinion. Hoffman’s definition of terrorism involves extremely violent acts and one of the terrorists’ goal he addresses, is to attract attention and shock. The definition that he attempts to give his readers falls short because it does not fully capture the chilling and grave aspects of terrorism.…show more content… Chapter two is an interesting chapter because Hoffman satisfyingly approaches the Palestinian Israel conflict through an analysis of its real dynamics of power and resentment. He also addresses the struggle that ethno-nationalist/separatist confronted during World War II. One of the main arguments that was pointed out by Hoffman in this chapter was “the fall of Singapore and the proclamation of the Atlantic Charter”, which both… exerted strong influence on indigenous nationalist movements, demonstrating… the vulnerability of once mighty empires and the hypocrisy of war time pledges of support for self-determination”