We’ve noted the massive hissy fit WorldNetDaily exhibited when Donald Trump’s mental health was called into question. Turns out WND offers the same objection — albeit for different reasons — when the mental health of those who commit terrorist acts is similarly questioned.
Leo Hohmann complained in an Aug. 5 WND article:
Is “mental illness” the new cover for jihadist attacks on the West?
It certainly seems that way, says a noted expert on jihad.
The latest “mentally unstable” young man to launch a seemingly random attack on unarmed civilians was Zakaria Bulhan, a 19-year-old Somali Muslim who had been resettled in Norway at the age of 5. Bulhan singled out an American woman in London and stabbed her to death Wednesday on a busy square filled with tourists, then injured five others in a stabbing spree before being apprehended.
“Authorities have ascribed jihad terror to mental illness on numerous occasions,” said Robert Spencer, including the Orlando, San Bernardino and Chattanooga attacks in the United States. Sometimes it sticks, but usually, days, weeks or even months later, when few people are still paying attention, the police will retract their earlier statements and admit it was a terrorist attack.
Hohmann also quotes his boss, WND managing editor David Kupelian, asking “Where does ‘radical Islam’ end and ‘mental illness’ begin? And what if they are the same thing?”
By contrast, Hohmann quoted WND author Carl Gallups effectively running to the defense of alleged Charleston massacre perpetrator Dylann Roof — who can’t be pigeonholed as a Muslim terrorist — by declaring he actually was suffering from mental illness because, in Hohmann’s words, “Roof was at the time of his arrest carrying Suboxone, a powerful narcotic commonly used to treat opiate dependence and has been linked with sudden outbursts of violence.” Of course, it couldn’t possibly be that Roof may have been taking his pro-apartheid cues and concerns about black-on-white crime from WND writers who spouted that sort of thing.
While Hohmann fills his article with the rantings of anti-Muslim activists, one voice is curiously missing from his discussion of the issue: that of any actual mental-health professional. You’d think that would be relevant to the conversation, but Hohmann doesn’t.
Hohmann followed up with an Aug. 19 article grousing that “a knife-wielding Muslim yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!'” who stabbed a Jewish rabbi in France was described as suffering from “psychiatric issues.” Hohmann offered his own armchair analysis: “The defining element of insanity, for legal purposes, has long been that the perpetrator is not aware that his actions were wrong. That would account for almost all Islamic terrorists, who believe their violent outbursts are part of the Quran’s instructions for them to wage jihad against non-Muslims and therefore they are morally justified.”
Hohmann once again quotes Muslim-hater Spencer but no mental-health professional.