Give the Seattle Post-Intelligencer opinion pages some credit for restoring a bit of balance that has largely eluded excuse-disposed daily local news reporters and news editors in covering Naveed Afzal Haq's Seattle Jewish Federation killings. A day after it appeared elsewhere, the P-I online runs columnist Jeff Jacoby's spot-on commentary arguing Haq represents another deadly and disturbing case of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome."

At a time when jihadist murder is a global threat and some of the most malevolent figures in the Islamic world -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, to name just two -- openly incite violence against Americans and Jews, the attack in Seattle should have been a huge story everywhere. Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with (actor Mel) Gibson's drunken (and anti-Semetic) outburst. Why the disparity?

No doubt part of the answer is that Gibson is a celebrity, and that "The Passion," his 2004 movie about the crucifixion, was criticized by many as a revival of the infamous anti-Semitic motif of Jews as Christ-killers. Gibson, who belongs to a traditionalist Catholic sect, was already suspected of harboring ill will toward Jews. His crude remarks on July 28 confirmed it, and pushed the subject back into the spotlight. But if previous behavior and religious belief explain the burst of interest in the Gibson story, they only deepen the question of why the Seattle bloodshed was played down. After all, Haq is not the first example of what scholar Daniel Pipes has called "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," in which a seemingly nonviolent Muslim erupts in a murderous rampage.

Just this year, for example, Mohammed Taheri-azar, a philosophy major at the University of North Carolina, deliberately rammed a car into a crowd of students, saying he wanted to "avenge the death of Muslims around the world." Michael Julius Ford opened fire in a Denver warehouse, killing one person and injuring five. "I don't know what happened to him yesterday," his sister Khali told the press. "He told me that Allah was going to make a choice and it was going to be good and told me people at his job was making fun of his religion."

Other cases in recent years include Hasan Akbar, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division, who attacked his fellow soldiers at an American command center in Kuwait with grenades and rifle fire, killing one and wounding 15; Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet, who killed two people when he shot up the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport in 2002; and Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, who was carrying a note denouncing "Zionists" and others who "must be annihilated & exterminated" when he opened fire on the observation deck of the Empire State building.

If the Catholic Gibson's nonviolent bigotry is a legitimate subject of media scrutiny, all the more so is the animus that spurs Muslims like Haq and the others to jihadist murder. As The New York Sun asked the other day, how many more Haqs must erupt in a homicidal rage before we open our eyes "to the possibility that they are part of a war in which understanding the enemy is a prerequisite for victory?"

It has been the first instinct of Seattle's media and liberal monolith to emphasize Naveed Afzal Haq's previous but sporadic signs of mental instability. However, the vast majority of people who suffer mental illness and specifically bipolarity, do so without becoming killers. In the end - if his words are to believed - Haq's anger at Israel's defense of itself and at the U.S. presence in Iraq led him to target, kill one, and attempt to kill other innocent Jews and their co-workers in Seattle. That is quite some way, especially in peaceful Seattle, of expressing discontent about U.S. and Israeli military actions against Muslim opponents. Haq shows every indication of being a political Islamist, rather than an overtly religious one. Haq's muted religiosity, and his dabbling in Christianity, even, have been helpful in persuading Seattle's dithering, judgement-averse moral relativists he was likely just a troubled man who "snapped." But Haq's political extremism is no less deadly and more importantly, no less a manifestation of Jihadist sensibilities than if he had a Koran in his pocket when he pulled the trigger again and again.

TECHNORATI TAGS: JEFF JACOBY, DANIEL PIPES, SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME, SEATTLE, JEWISH FEDERATION NAVEED AFZAL HAQ, MEL GIBSON