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It works the other way too. A clearly mentally-ill lone wolf is judged evil, and representative of a greater evil, when his crime suits the purposes of a political movement. Polytechnique massacrist Marc Lepine was the very epitome of the lone wolf beset by personal demons. He had no ideology, belonged to no movement, followed no leader, but was counter-narrated by feminists into a poster boy for the politically correct (alleged) evil of inherent male misogyny.

And when the killer is demonstrably a true believer? Again, Who? Whom? To denounce fundamentalist Christianity in the rare event of a Bible-thumper’s killing of an abortion doctor, whether the killer is mentally disturbed or not, is never perceived as racism. But linkage of any terrorist act to Islam is repugnant to liberals, even when the killers themselves declare Islam is their motivation.

We saw intense Islamo-cringism following the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, in which Maj. Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist who had made his Islamist views well-known for years, shot 13 people dead while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” (His business card had the words “Soldier of Allah” on it!)

But liberals refused to recognize ideology as his motivation, several insisting on the desperation counter-narrative of PTSD (he was never in combat, but it was claimed he was driven over the edge by stories he heard from soldiers who had been to Iraq and Afghanistan). “I cringe that he’s a Muslim … I think he’s probably just a nut case,” wrote Evan Thomas of Newsweek. Time’s Joe Klein went farther, denouncing “odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.” (Really, Joe? It’s not the Islamists, it’s those pesky Jooz that are the real problem?)