On the O’Reilly Factor yesterday, O’Reilly discussed how the liberal media continues to pound away at the “mental illness” angle in regards to Nidal Malik Hasan. Sally Quinn, of the Washington Post, joined him on the program and typically carried the torch for the Left on the issue.

While O’Reilly made the obvious case of Hasan being a jihadist, Quinn stumbled all over herself, emphasizing the “emotionally disturbed” angle and balking from associating Hasan with jihad. Alan Colmes did the same on O’Reilly the previous day, stressing how Hasan was disturbed and crazy and, of course, everything under the sun except a terrorist acting out of his Islamic faith. (Even though everything that came out of Hasan’s mouth was about jihad).

What I can’t get in all of this is where did we get this assumption that having emotional problems and being a jihadist are mutually exclusive?

Isn’t the whole issue that jihadists are jihadists precisely because they have emotional problems? Is there, for instance, a member of Hamas or Hezbollah, or of the Communist or Nazi Party for that matter, who has their head screwed on right? When a suicide bomber blows himself up in an Israeli café, does he do it because he doesn’t have emotional problems?

Anti-Semitism is, obviously, an emotional problem. Anti-Americanism is, obviously, an emotional problem — as sociologist Paul Hollander has profoundly documented in his scholarship.

These phenomena are depersonalized neuroses. If you want to cleanse the earth of Jews, for instance, and you work toward that goal, you are obviously a severely screwed up individual. If you consider female sexuality evil and, in allegiance to Islamic ideology, you force women into invisibility with burqas and you engage in honor killings and female genital mutilation and other monstrosities to stamp out female sexual identity, autonomy and self-determination, you are obviously a severely screwed up  individual. You definitely have emotional problems. How does that take away the evil of your acts and beliefs? How does it cancel out the pernicious danger and the reality of your ideology?

Hitler and Stalin were emotionally and psychologically screwed up. Does this fact make the threat they represented immaterial? Does it take the evil out of Communism and Nazism?

I wonder how many leftists and liberals think that George W.  Bush was simultaneously emotionally disturbed and conservatively evil? Why do I have a feeling that their insistence on these things being mutually exclusive would disappear out the window in this case?

This all doesn’t make any sense of course and it is not meant to make any sense. It’s just another one of those tactics the liberal-Left employs to throw dust into the eyes in order to distract society from the existence of an evil adversary. Because their goal is for us to focus on the supposed evil of our society — which they hate and wish to destroy.

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[To get the whole story on the nature of the jihadi threat and why the liberal Left forbids the naming of it, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.]