Taking Hoaxes Seriously

Table 1 also shows the number of hoaxes rela- tive to all terrorist incidents coded in each of the three datasets, in their full cross-national sam- ples (columns A and B, for ITERATE and the WMDDB), as well as the incidents coded as Cana- da-specifi c (column C). [...] Canadian hoaxes account for eight of the 322 transnational hoaxes coded in ITERATE, and thirty-nine of the CBRN hoaxes coded in the WMDDB. [...] The authors include times series dedicated to each of the following categories: all incidents, hostage incidents, bombings, assassi- nations, and “threats and hoaxes.” For each of the series, the authors identify cycles of diff erent lengths. [...] Examining their cases in relation to two pyramid models of radicalization, one for violent opinion and the other for violent action, they suggest that he moved from the apex of the opinion pyramid to that of the action pyramid when he began “stalk[ing] abortion providers with the intention of killing them,” but then moved down the action pyramid to continue his fi ght by harmless means (i.e. [...] To account for such systematic biases in the datasets’ inclusion of events as well as varying levels of overall terrorist activity across regions, it is instructive to consider the proportion of hoaxes in each region’s overall terrorist activity, in addition to the absolute frequency of hoax- es described above.