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Lack of education does play a role, as does religion.
But both alone do not cause terrorism. Politics tends to polarize people for a reason and is usually the trigger for someones conversion to the radical side.
I mean, who kills themselves by saying "Verse .... says you must kill this .... because God commands it"
Doesn't work nearly as well as "Those in US and UK are killing your brothers and sisters in .... raping or stealing oil, your sacrifice will be noted down. You will be a hero blah blah ..." something like that tends to be more effective.
It can certainly be a trigger, but I guess what I'm getting at is that it's not really the "but-for" cause for most of this. Even without a particular political situation, many of the people who resort to terrorism would nevertheless be involved in some other way. But for oppression/poverty/religious extremism, that wouldn't usually be the case.
It is most certainly a complex and coupled system. But I think a lot of contention comes from the fact that there are a few willing to blame the whole of it on religion and religion alone. It's not just a religious thing. Certainly it's an important element, especially given the theocratic tendencies of the area. Theocracies corrupt religion faster than anything else. I think what some people want to impress is that it's not just a religious thing, it's not just being Muslim which influences this. Places with the most oppression and least amount of access to a system to combat it are going to be more likely to engage in terrorism than other places. There's no simple formula, but that also means there is rarely only one root cause.
This is all true, and I completely understand the desire to defend something from the sweeping generalizations of an angry group of people. I'm just pointing out that the existence of the political issues doesn't correlate to the incidence of terrorism at anywhere near the level that other factors do.