Tim Blair, Daniel Pipes, and important new insights into the current crusade ...

(Above: brave knights on a crusade).

Today both Daniel Pipes and Tim Blair have provided important new psychological insights into the behavior of 28 year old Alexander Wiens, the German man who stabbed a woman to death in a Dresden courtroom.

While Wiens has denied any racist motivation for his deed, the speculation has arisen because of the ferocity of the attack, which involved Wiens smuggling a seven-inch knife in his backpack into the courtroom, then stabbing Marwa al-Sherbini, a 31 year old pharmacist fifteen or sixteen times, so that she then bled to death in front of her three year old son and her husband. When the police arrived, they shot her husband, Elwy Okaz, a research scientist, in the leg by mistake.

Commentators have speculated that talk of crusades and jihads - first enunciated by American President George Bush - might well have inflamed the crazed mind of the killer.

The dispute that led to the killing began a year earlier, in August 2008, on a Dresden playground when Ms. Sherbini asked Mr. Wiens to let her young son use a swing he was sitting on. Mr. Wiens made racist insults against Ms. Sherbini, who wore a head scarf, calling her a “terrorist” and an “Islamist.”

Ms. Sherbini called the police. It was after she appeared as a witness in the case that Mr. Wiens took a seven-inch knife from his backpack and attacked her and her husband, Elwy Okaz, in the courtroom.

You can read further details of the story here at The New York Times, under the header Life for German Who Killed Woman in Court.

Why you can even read about it in the antipodes as the news spreads to the bottom of the world, 'Veiled martyr' killer gets life.

The case is being widely interpreted as either an indication that the Christian crusade against Muslims is now gathering widespread force, or that Wiens might well have been influenced by satantic secularist thinking, as he was born in Russia.

Both Blair and Pipes have produced, or will produce, or no doubt are in the process of producing, insightful analyses suggesting that there is a deep sickness at the heart of the Christian crusade. No doubt they will reject suggestions that Wies might have been suffering from indifferent schizophrenia, or that this was the one off work of a crazed mind, and no deeper significance should be sought in the relationship between religions and cultures.

At the same time, they will no doubt further develop the thesis that liberals and do-gooders have for too long relied on psychological excuses for murdering scum, and campaign for these liberals to stand in the dock of public opinion alongside the killer.

You can also find further details of the man who killed a woman for the sake of a 780 euro fine here at CNN.

Unfortunately, gosh darn it, try as I might, I seem to have mis-placed the links to the Blair and Pipes pieces.

I'm still looking, because no doubt they will place the story on the same significant level as they placed the story of the crazed US Major jihadist, because of its resonant cultural and religious overtones, and because of what it says about hatred and intolerance. You can find the story about the US Major here, and here.

It's important to stress that there is absolutely no truth to the rumor, nor any proof whatsover, that Wiens was a regular reader of Blair and Pipes. Or that he had even read or heard of them at all.

At the same time, I'd also like to scotch the rumor that I assaulted a nun in King street for wearing a penguin suit, despite claims that such dress evokes Freudian memories of a troubled childhood.

Just another day in loon pond, where murder and madness are traduced, hobbled and shackled into causes, crusades and jihads, and insight flies out the window.

(Below: preferred way to produce sound effects for your crusade, and a handy tee to wear while doing it).