Terrorism is a complex problem with many diverse causes. Consequently no single effective method to counter it exists. To combat terrorism, one must first understand the underlying motivations for each particular group's actions. Terrorism, an issue that plagues our world every minute of every day. You never know when or where a terrorist organization is going to strike. All groups’ reasons are different, some for political or religious reasons, others for hatred. The roots of terrorism are believed to have started in 1007 A.D. Hassan ben Sabbah born in Qom, Iran was an Ishmaili Muslim and opposed all other Muslim groups except for the Ishmaili’s. He is believed to be the father of terrorism. Ben Sabbah’s actions had started a whole new trend; people began to follow his actions and started to form terrorist organizations.
When you define terrorism most definitions say it is the act of violence and/or intimidation to achieve certain political or religious goals. Terrorism is a problem everywhere not just the Middle East, contrary to what people think. People think there is such a thing as a “typical terrorist”, but there really is not. I guess it could be said that terrorists are stereotyped in many ways. Many people believe that terrorists in the Middle East are either Muslims or Islamic, which is not true either. Just because a person is of one region of the world it does not mean they are a terrorist. As far as I am concerned it could be a next door neighbor. But to understand what terrorism is you must first understand the causes; the motivation to commit these acts of violence.
First, at the government level states may use terrorism against their own people or other nations for several reasons. One state may wish to force their message of ideology, politics, or religion upon people or other nations. Second states may use terrorism to eliminate dissent among the population. Third governments may resort to terrorism to eliminate normal political systems or because of fear of another system developing and being embraced by citizens. Fourth, the government may use terror to harass, control, or eliminate political, religious, or radical minorities. Fifth, the government may be in constant conflict with external enemies. Sixth, the government may be in business purely for itself and for what it can get without regard to the welfare of its citizens. What remains to be settled is just how terrorism differs from other political violence. To begin, no definition of terrorism has included rioting, civil war, revolution, or international war; though analysts have agreed that terrorist incidents may occur in conjunction with or as a part of such violence. The consensus is that terrorist violence is more organized and deliberate than rioting, lesser in organization and scale than war. Differentiating assassination and terrorism is more problematic. Ben-Yehuda argues strongly that terrorism must be distinguished from assassination, but has been unable to pin down the exact nature of the presumed differences. He suggests that terrorism is indiscriminate killing aimed at a general target while assassination targets specific individuals, but is admittedly unable to maintain the distinction in his own case analyses. As the number of victims rises, observers appear to be increasingly likely to describe the incident as terrorism rather than assassination. And insofar as "innocents" such as children, café patrons, and passing motorists are victims, the violence is more likely to be viewed as terrorism. But the difficulty is that deliberate attacks on specific individuals because of their political importance may harm people who just happen to be in the line of fire or nearby when the bomb explodes. Assassination is targeted at specific persons even though others may be harmed, while terrorism is characterized by essentially random targeting. Both aim at maximum political impact, but differ in the rationale for target selection: the assassin believes that killing one or more specific persons will be effective in weakening the will of the opposition; the terrorist believes that the randomness of victimization—especially if casualties are maximized—will be effective, particularly by spreading the perceived risks of victimization.
To summarize, terrorism is defined as politically motivated violence, for which organizations are directly or indirectly responsible, that is intended to weaken the will of the opposition by using random targeting to spread the fear of victimization. The five psychological approaches that have been used in efforts to understand terrorists: psychoanalytical, learning, frustration-aggression, narcissism-aggression, trait, developmental, and motivational/rational choice. First: the development of facilitating traits, with the most often reported being fear, hostility, depression, guilt, antiauthoritarianism, perceived lack of manliness, self-centeredness, extreme extroversion, need for high risks or stress, and alienation. Second: frustration or narcissistic rage resulting in aggressive behavior. Third: associational drives arising from social marginality and isolation. Fourth: learning opportunities to which members of terrorist organizations are exposed, through which orientations and behaviors are shaped. Fifth: cost-benefit calculations by which terrorist acts are justified as the only or most effective means to achieve political goals.
Three conclusions are drawn from reviewing efforts to explain terrorism. First, terrorists are not psychologically much different from the rest of us. Second, their organizations are shifting toward looser networks rather than the tight hierarchies of the past. Third, the environments inspiring terrorism are increasingly cultural, and specifically religious. In time, assassin came generally to mean one who killed an unsuspecting victim without warning, but the original sense of political purpose was never quite lost, and has become increasingly strong. To assassinate is to kill for a political reason to secure or resist authority, to eliminate a rival for power, to prevent or avenge a political defeat, or to express a political grievance. Political motivation distinguishes assassination from other deadly interpersonal violence. Unfortunately for analytic rigor, motivation is extremely difficult to establish.
How one approaches the problem of explaining assassination depends on one's assumptions about political violence. If violence for political reasons is considered to be unusual and unjustifiable, the causes of assassination are expected to lie in the psychopathology of individual killers. If political violence is thought to be aberrant but sometimes justifiable, or at least understandable, causes are sought in threatening or oppressive social conditions, which in principle can be changed so as to eliminate the violence. If violence is seen as an intrinsic dimension and a common instrument of politics, causes are to be found in the varying fortunes and tactics of social groups attempting to defend or increase their life chances. A developed scientific theory of assassination presumably would avoid moral assumptions about political violence and would encompass all three causal sources, treating them as sets of variables whose interrelationships result in an increasing or decreasing probability of assassination events. No such theory yet exists. Toward that goal, the following hypotheses are to be considered: (1) The more threatening or oppressive social conditions are for a particular group the more likely the group is to resort to assassination and other forms of violence; (2) individuals with certain psychopathologic characteristics are more likely to be selected for the actual work of killing; alternatively, those selected develop psychopathological characteristics because of the guilt, isolation, fear, suffering, or other experiences associated with their "dirty work." Research on the social causes of assassination indicates that oppression is probably less important than threat in affecting the probability of assassination. Gross has defined oppression as "acts of physical brutality, including killing and limitation of freedom, humiliation of persons, economic exploitation, deprivation of elementary economic opportunities, and confiscation of property. Ethnic and nationalist conflicts appear to be far more important factors than socioeconomic conditions in encouraging assassination and other political violence. Political violence tends to be the work of higher-class visionaries and activists, in contrast to the lower-class predatory types who engaged in "common criminal violence.” Assassination is associated with political instability, which in turn reflects such factors as a low level of socioeconomic development, a high level of relative deprivation, and a high rate of socioeconomic change. Other contributing factors are a government neither very coercive nor very permissive, and high levels of externalized aggression and hostility toward foreigners, among minority and majority groups, and among individuals, as indicated by high homicide and low suicide rates. The United States is exceptional in combining an advanced level of socioeconomic development with the other features. It is noted that African Americans and other major sectors of the population do generally live under conditions internally approximating those found to be associated with relatively high levels of political violence.
The findings suggest that socioeconomic conditions must interact with political and cultural factors to become significant in causing assassination and other political violence. It appears that oppression becomes causally relevant only when it is interpreted as threat, whereas perceived threat in itself is sufficient to encourage political violence. One major implication of this general proposition is that economic conditions must become political factors to affect the level of political violence. A further implication is that political conditions must be interpreted as threatening in order to be causally significant. The process of interpretation is, then, the key to creating situations in which the probability of assassination and other political violence is significantly increased. Threats may be real whether or not perceived. For a group to have fewer resources while another has more implies a present or potential threat to the life chances of the disadvantaged. The greater the differences, the greater the likelihood that the more advantaged group is living in part at the expense of the less advantaged. Certainly, the less advantaged live more precariously and are more vulnerable to life's miseries. For them, it is not difficult to see or believe that inequality is threatening. At the same time, the more advantaged will readily see or believe that underclass discontent or gains are threatening. At any given moment, the available resources are finite; the pie cannot be shared without someone having less if another is to have more. Both sides are likely to feel threatened by change particularly by high rates of socioeconomic change because it is difficult to predict just who will win and who will lose in the course of events. Psychological profiles of assassins are derived from limited and unrepresentative samples biased in several ways. First, assassins who attack governmental and other institutional figures have been studied, rather than assassins acting on behalf of such figures. Second, assassins of chief executives and other prominent individuals have been studied, to the virtual exclusion of those who kill minor officials and ordinary people. Third, only assassins who have been caught have been studied, so that almost nothing is known about those who are deterred or who escape detection and capture. Fourth, analysis has focused on expressive reactors, with little or no attention having been given to hired killers and political actors. Fifth, the presumption of psychopathology has been strong in both the selection of subjects for study, usually by psychiatrists, and in the analysts' common tendency to see political (and other) violence as intrinsically abnormal and irrational.
Finally, the possibility of organized, tactical assassination has tended to be dismissed in favor of an image of the assassin as typically a loner without coherent political motivation and unable to act in concert with others to further political aims. His impact of assassination varies according to the political milieu. Assassination undermines democratic institutions insofar as it deters able persons from seeking positions of leadership, reduces the public's sense of security, or leads to repression and vigilantism. In more totalitarian systems it encourages opportunism and autocracy, inhibits creative effort and cooperation, and therefore probably reduces the capacity for adapting to environmental and internal changes. Where economic and political instability are endemic, as in much of the developing world, assassination makes it even less likely that able leaders will emerge or have time enough to act effectively. In short, where political order is lacking, assassination helps to prevent its achievement; where it is established, assassination contributes to its erosion or ossification. Assassination is not only a terrorist weapon but has a mixed tracked record of politically sensitive method of counterterrorism as it is often seen as illegal and lowering you to the terrorists level and if mistakes are made leads to the death of innocent people. As the cheapest and simplest terrorist method it will remain in use by terrorist organizations but with tightened security around important people it is becoming a less attractive option. As previously mentioned, terrorism is closely related to assassination and no discussion on the latter would be complete without a discussion of the former as well. Besides an obvious systematic and deliberate act of murder, terrorism can also be referred to as either a mass assassination, or a terroristic assassination. Terrorism, according to one source, is “assassinations contrived to create a fear sufficient to destroy a whole system. Terrorism implies a movement whose objective can only be achieved by repeated assassinations over relatively long periods of time, for fear dissipates when pressure is relaxed or exercised intermittently. Similar to assassinations, terrorism has plagued and continues to plague many (if not most) nations, often resulting in political chaos or upset. Furthermore, as with assassinations, terrorism is also saturated with politics; however, unlike assassinations, terrorism is employed through strategy, fueled by religious or ecological motives, and carried out with the ultimate goal of power. Although united by a common denominator, murder, the conceptual differences between assassinations and terrorism are profound and really should not be compared or linked as one.

References
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. Political Assassinations by Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Ellis, Albert, and Gullo, John M. Murder and Assassination. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1971.
Harris, Irving D. "Assassins." In Violence: Perspectives on Murder and Aggression. Irwin L. Kutash, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978. Pages 198–218.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Smith, Brent L. Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994.