It's Almost Supernatural points out that not only a recent Harvard study shows that suicide terrorists are not motivated by poverty, but even Islamic scholars are starting to acknowldedge that too.
Daniel Pipes wrote about this in "Arafat's Suicide Factory" three years ago:

Islamic Jihad, which along with Hamas trains the suicide killers, explains: "We do not take depressed people. If there were a one-in-a-thousand chance that a person was suicidal, we would not allow him to martyr himself. In order to be a martyr bomber, you have to want to live." The same strange logic applies for Hamas, which rejects anyone "who commits suicide because he hates the world."

Convincing healthy individuals to blow themselves up is obviously not easy, but requires ideas and institutions. The process begins with the Palestinian Authority (PA) inculcating two things into its population, starting with the children: a hatred of Jews and a love of death. School curricula, camp activities, TV programming and religious indoctrination all portray Israelis in a Nazi-style way, as sub-human being worthy of killing; and then deprecate the instinct for self-preservation, telling impressionable young people that sacrificing their lives is the most noble of all goals.

Pipes, by the way, notes an article by Nasra Hassan, "An Arsenal of Believers" that gives the chilling details of how young men are recruited to become martyrs.
So suicide terror are not acts of desperation, but the cynical manipulation of gullible youth to turn them into lethal weapons.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.