Is mental disorder one of the leading causes of Islamic based terrorism?

Most of us have met folks who seemed somewhat strange and we think they are suffering from a psychological problem. But because we are not trained professionally in mental health science, we can at best guess or state inclusively when something isn’t right without the ability to go into specifics.

Yesterday, the Muslim man who attacked the civilians in France is believed to have a long history of mental illness.

On Sunday a driver screaming "God is great" in Arabic ran down pedestrians in Dijon, injuring 11, two seriously. The man who carried out Sunday's attack was arrested after targeting pedestrians in five different parts of the city in the space of half an hour. He is said to be "apparently imbalanced" and to have spent time in a psychiatric hospital. The driver has been known to police for minor incidents dating back 20 years, he added. The prosecutor in Dijon said the attacker had a long history of mental illness and the incident was not linked to terrorism.

The perpetrator of the Sydney attack last week was also someone who was certifiably insane according to the news sources: Australia cafe attacker: Terrorist or just a lunatic?

In the days since the deadly attack, debate has swirled across Australia about whether to term it an act of religious-inspired political terrorism or an aberrant action by a lunatic with a giant thirst for attention.

The other interesting point-of-view presented in the article is on how do you classify this sort of attacks against random civilians; A lone-wolf type of attack or part of a larger coordinated attack that falls under Islamic terrorism?

Security analyst Neil Fergus said in the Sydney Morning Herald that classifying the attack as terrorism "would only be feeding the propaganda machine" of Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Fairfax Media's Clementine Ford wrote that linking the attack to terrorism was racist.

But others call such attitudes "denialism" in an age when Islamist extremist groups are calling for lone-wolf attacks against "infidels" from Australia to America. "Terrorism is violence perpetrated for political purposes, and despite any personal, legal or mental problems Monis might have faced, he clearly intended this incident to be an act of terrorist theater," said security analyst Scott Stewart of Stratfor, a Texas-based security analysis group. "Just because Monis was more of a bumbling Kramer than a deadly Carlos the Jackal does not mean he was not a grass-roots terrorist operative. Indeed … most grass-roots operatives tend to be more like stray mutts than lone wolves."

In the future, I think it would also be interesting to look deeply into the life of the leaders of terror groups who could as well be as crazy as some of their followers.

References
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30580082
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-australia-terrorism-20141222-story.html