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'Insane is what Anders Behring Breivik's lawyer calls him. "Crazy" and "psychotic" is how many describe the man behind the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II. Hunting down teens like rabbits with a high- powered rifle to defeat a purported Muslim invasion of Europe seems definitively, absolutely irrational. But The New York Times, which unswervingly refers to Islamist atrocities as isolated incidents by crazed loners, will have none of that. The day after the tragedy, its headline ran: "Norway Charges Christian Extremist." Breivik is nothing of the sort.
In his rambling 1,500-page manifesto, "2083: A European Declaration of Independence," Breivik explains that he is not a Bible-believing Christian. "Christian fundamentalist theocracy" is "everything we DO NOT want," he wrote. A "secular European society" is "what we DO want."
It was not only the Times that so much wanted Breivik to be an agent of the Cross and an exemplar of the hated right. Using classic defamatory technique, European and American media raced to blame the entire anti-jihadist movement for murder by association, with the goal of setting the legitimate concerns many ordinary people have with radical Islamists beyond the pale of civilized discourse.
For US mainstream media, this was déjà vu all over again: Recall the media chorus that painted Jared Loughner, the man who shot Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a right winger inspired by Tea Party rhetoric, even a Sarah Palin groupie. Loughner, it turned out, is an anti-war, Satan-worshipping, left-wing pothead. Recall that Timothy McVeigh, the first American terrorist cast by...