I have looked at a few different articles that focus on acts of mass violence and the differences between mental illness and terrorism.
Aaron Alexis who perpetrated the mass killing at Washington’s Navy Yard is part of the now familiar pattern of lone gunmen striking at American society with sickening frequency. There was no rational, political, social, or religious arguments behind what Alexis did. His actions, though thoroughly condemned, were explained away as the wayward and solitary acts of a mentally disturbed individual. America made the right noises–the president said the right words–and then went about its business.
The American media, after sniffing about for any Muslim connection and discovering none, did not use the word “terror” to describe the incident at the Navy Yard. Terrorism has unfortunately become a shorthand for “a violent act committed by a Muslim.” We see no “terror experts” pouring through the verses and holy books of Alexis’s former religion, Christianity, or his new religion, Buddhism, to find any reasons for his murderous act, as is the case whenever a Muslim commits any such violent crime. They rather pointed to his history of mental illness and paranoia, such as reports of hearing voices and claiming people followed him with a microwave machine.
What happened in Nairobi and Peshawar was quite different. In Peshawar, the Taliban group responsible for the attack declared that they had committed the suicide bombing of All Saints Church in revenge for American drone strikes in the Tribal Areas. A Taliban statement read, “Until and unless drone strikes are stopped, we will continue to strike wherever we will find an opportunity against non-Muslims.” In Kenya, al Shabab announced its assault on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi as revenge for the 2011 Kenyan military invasion to oust al Shabab from control of southern Somalia, where Kenyan troops are still stationed. An al Shabab spokesman stated, “Either leave our country or live with constant attacks.”It is clear that the actions of the Taliban and al Shabab, both emerging from tribal societies (the Pashtun and Somali, respectively) with defined codes of honor, is not motivated by religion but a mutation of tribal behavior which emphasizes revenge. All their violent actions, despite the ominous warnings of the “terror experts” who point to verses of the Quran, are in fact antithetical to both their tribal and Islamic traditions.
Islam categorically rejects this kind of violence, calling upon Muslims to practice compassion above all. Abu Bakr, the first caliph after the prophet, laid down the rules of war which were to be practiced by all Muslims, among them the forbidding of killing innocent people. The prophet was, likewise, explicit about the prohibition of violence against Christians. In a letter to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, he wrote, “No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses…The Muslims are to fight for them…Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.” The violence in places like Peshawar and Nairobi has nothing to do with religion, but rather the broken relationship between central governments and tribal peripheries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/09/24/mental-illness-islam-or-revenge-understanding-terrorism-from-the-navy-yard-to-pakistan-to-kenya/
Firstly, the preponderance of religiosity in psychotic episodes is a well-documented phenomenon. That’s not to say that religion causes psychosis, of course, but that, probably due to religion’s central role in much of society, people given to psychotic episodes oftentimes latch on to religion in strange and severe ways.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169063/why-cant-terrorists-be-mentally-ill-too#
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