Muslims and terrorism

I fully endorse the sentiments expressed by Sabria S. Jawhar in her article “When can we call a 17-year-old white kid a terrorist?” (May 27) in Saudi Pulse section. Readers will very well remember how a Norwegian court found the mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, to be sane and sentenced him to 21 years in jail. Breivik insisted that he was sane and refused to plead guilty, seeking to justify his attacks by saying they were necessary to stop the “Islamization of Norway.” From the very beginning of the case, prosecutors had called for him to be considered insane. This was in fact just a face-saving attempt to show the world that it is a mad man behind the killings of 77 youths in a bombing in Oslo and gun attack on a summer camp on Utoeya island and not a terrorist. Then we read with shock the massacre of 27 people 18 of whom were little children just before Christmas in a US school in Connecticut. The conclusion here too was that he was mentally deranged but not a terrorist. We saw such terror acts in California, Oklahoma, Texas and many other schools and universities in the US but all those involved in these brutal acts were supposed to have been carried out by insane people but not terrorists. However, they did not waste time in calling the two pressure-cooker bombers in Boston ‘terrorists’ soon after the explosion! Anyhow we do not condone what happened in Boston but we want to know how to differentiate between the insane and the terrorists.