Drawing the Wrong Lesson From the 'Double Standard'

A smug lefty gripes about the "unfairness" of the political landscape:

...The political debate began immediately. Loughner was thought to be influenced by the far right. The right attempted to blame the left.

The corporate media and political elites have since circled the wagons, “agreeing” that the assassin was “mentally ill” and acted alone. However, no proof has been provided or a professional psychiatric tests done to reach this conclusion.

This follows a pattern whenever a white person carries out a terrorist or political attack. The attacker is labeled “unhinged” and said to be acting alone.

In contrast, when an Arab- or Hispanic-looking person is involved, there is an assumption of international links. Is he tied to Al Qaeda? Is he tied to the drug cartel or Mexican people smugglers?

The vitriol directed at the Islamic Community centre in New York, where false charges of promoting “holy war” and possible links to terrorism are routinely mentioned by the media, shows the double standard...

Right on, smug lefty! There is indeed a double standard at work here, one which sees no jihad and hears no jihad even when it jumps up and screams "Allahu Akbar!" (at which point the assumption is that the jihadi is not part of a global effort to establish Islam's primacy--because such a thing is a figment of the "Islamophobes'" overheated imagination--but is a one-of, unaffiliated nutter). The flip side of that is that, without any evidence at all, a one-of nutter such as Loughner is said to have become unhinged because of overheated right-wing rhetoric (and will now no doubt be trotted out a la Timothy McVeigh every time a Muslim/Muslim apologist wants to demonstrate that "terrorism" is not solely a Muslim pursuit).