I’ve just figured out why media conjectures about Breivik's sanity have been puzzling me

Norwegian psychiatrists were split as to whether Breivik is clinically insane – i.e. he's a paranoid schizophrenic – or merely suffers from personality disorders. The court decided that he wasn’t suffering from a genuine mental illness (two out of three Norwegians agreed), but that didn’t stop many members of our liberal media establishment – the BBC in particular - refusing to accept the court’s finding.

How, they argued, could anyone hold the views Breivik held, do the things he did, and still be considered sane? Although I don’t agree with it, this strikes me as a perfectly reasonable line to take. After all, many rational people – including me - feel that our ruling elite has made a terrible mistake encouraging mass immigration while supporting multiculturalism, but we don’t feel that murdering the next generation of that elite is a reasonable way to tackle the problem. There are some actions which are so extreme, so completely inhuman and indefensible, that it’s almost easier to label the perpetrator insane rather than follow the logic that led them from premise to conclusion.

But here’s the rub: I’m not aware that BBC current affairs presenters ever posit the theory that Islamist terrorists are insane: fanatical, extreme, yes… but not actually mad. That could be because most Al Quaeda-style outrages require a mini-army of people to conceive, plan, finance and organise them, and we tend to view madness as a solitary affliction.

More significant, I think, is that many of the liberal commentators who are utterly incapable of imagining that Breivik’s main premises might be valid are willing to treat Islamofascist terrorists' logic as at least partially valid because they share the view that America is evil, that it is anti-Muslim, that it only really has itself to blame for terrorist attacks on Westerners, and that the price for America’s success has been the oppression, exploitation and deliberate impoverishment of Third World countries, including most Arab states.

Modern liberals – i.e. the enlightened among us – have a tendency to view anyone who disagrees with their world-view as either mad or evil, or both. Hence anyone who is opposed to mass immigration or multiculturalism (or the EU or sceptical about climate change or convinced that only public spending cuts will save the economy) is probably certifiably insane (as well, of course, as being almost inconceivably nasty and wicked and selfish).

It’s not necessarily what Breivik did that makes him mad in the eyes of many media liberals – it’s the political beliefs that underpinned his actions. Contrariwise, as long as Islamist mass-murderers loathe the United States, their belief that infidels must convert to islam or be slaughtered, that establishing a world-wide caliphate is a reasonable, achievable goal, and that their God will reward those prepared to die in order to kill entirely innocent people (including Muslims) – well, what's nuts about that?