Ali David Sonboly, the young man who shot up Munich last week, killing 9 mostly young people and wounding dozens of others, is driving the mainstream media nuts.  It’s so bad, they can’t even decide what they want to call him.  Is it Ali David Sonboly, or David Ali Sonboy, or just David Sonboy, as the primly and properly PC BBC tried to have it?

But now it’s really getting confusing.  As this article from the Mirror, among many others, now reports, Sonboly “reportedly saw it as an ‘honour’ that he had the same birthday as the Nazi leader [Hitler] - April 20,” “was proud to be a German-Iranian ‘Aryan,’” and “felt ‘superior’ to those of either [Turk or Arab] origin.”  These discoveries greatly aggravate the already severe disorientation that the MSM has suffered over his motives.  It seems that some among them think Sonboly was a neo-Nazi Irano-Aryan acolyte of Breivik – anything, please, but a Muslim.

So, was this young man just a “lazy” and “chubby” misfit who moved from depression to derangement and then obsession with mass murder for  fascist reasons, or was he acting out of some influence of radical Islam?  Or aren’t both possible?

Let’s go back to the Mirror’s points and unpack them, particularly for the benefit of those in the MSM who have delicate sensibilities about all things Islamic and Muslim and who avert their eyes from anything critical of their precious pet community.  Here are some rather simple points from Islamic history.

Islamism, the revivalist version of Islam supported by large numbers of Muslims worldwide, borrows heavily from both communism and fascism.  Eric Hoffer explained all that back in the 1950s.  More explicitly, there were close historical alliances between the Nazis and the radical Muslims of the day.  Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had ties to Hitler, helped Himmler recruit Muslim troops for the SS, and collaborated with the Nazis on paramilitary operations in the Mideast.  In recent times, Muslim clerics have praised the Nazis’ extermination of Jews even while trying to deny the Holocaust.  At the same time, the Iranian government has regularly indulged in Holocaust denial while holding Israel and Jews to be anathema.  It should therefore not be surprising that someone proud of his Muslim heritage should also feel proud of sharing a birthday with Hitler – while still having nothing the do with the bête noir of the Left, the political “far Right.”

Speaking of Iran, in light of Sonboly’s Iranian heritage it is not surprising that he would be prejudiced against mostly Sunni Arabs and Turks.  The simplest explanation might be that he resented being bullied by Arab and Turk classmates.  Yet there could easily be much more than that.  Turks and Arabs are the ancient enemies of the Iranians, particularly since the rise of Islam and the almost immediate schism of the community into its Sunni and Shi’a parties.  If he had merely listened to his elders, not to mention studied his ancestral history, he could easily have absorbed these atavistic prejudices.  In having them, he certainly wouldn’t be alone among Iranians – or vice versa.  Moreover, his Sunni Turkish and Arab classmates who bullied him could even have been expressing their own atavistic animosities towards Shi’ites.  After all, this circle of secular hate has been rotating for 1,400 years.  Why should it not come to Europe with the migrants?

As for his reported affection for the idea that he was Aryan, a dog-whistle to Leftists in the MSM and reported in several outlets, the answer is quite simple: the word Iran is derived from the root of the word “Aryan” and the Iranians proudly see themselves as an Aryan people.

Thus there is nothing particularly surprising about Sonboly’s affinity for Hitler, given his Muslim heritage, nor about his prejudices against Sunni Muslims, nor his self-identification as an Aryan.  Nor is it surprising that he has not been connected to ISIS or al-Qaeda, since they are virulently anti-Shi’a Sunni groups.  Yet that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t religiously inspired to commit terrorizing murder, nor would such zealous inspiration rule out mental illness.  This combination has been noted in numerous other Muslim terrorists.

What is unusual is that a youth with this Shi’a Iranian background went ballistic.  In the West, we’ve become so used to the much more common narrative of a Sunni kid going on a rampage that we don’t expect it to happen with a Shi’ite in countries such as Germany – perhaps because there are so few of them.  Well, maybe we now have to start recognizing that Shi’ites too can go on sudden jihad.

All that said, we still don’t know for sure what role, if any, radical Islamic teachings played in this tragedy.  Perhaps we’ll find out from Sonboly’s 16-year-old Afghanistani-immigrant friend who was arrested for not revealing his plans.  There’s considerable evidence pointing to a role of Islam, but the German authorities must first complete their investigations and then we must depend on them to report the facts.  Given that they – along with many members of the global MSM – seem to have been loath to connect Islam to attacks ranging from the mass sexual assaults on the past New Year’s Eve to the most recent spate of attacks, it is not a foregone conclusion that they will release the facts.

There is a strong and natural tendency to want to find simple explanations, particularly ones that fit with one’s ideological preferences.  The simplest and most comforting explanation in the MSM and much of the Western ruling elites for the rising tide of terror is that Islamic terrorism is rare, linked tightly to a few Salafist Sunni organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda (which, supposedly and conveniently are on the run), and that it is a perversion of Islam.  When incidents don’t fit this comfortable narrative, the MSM and authorities go to great lengths either to make them fit or to disqualify them as anything related to Islam.

There are many reasons for this behavior, but two major political initiatives are playing critical roles at the moment.  One is that the European authorities don’t want to admit that the migrant crisis is allowing dangerous people into their populations.  Angela Merkel reinforced this in her press conference on July 28, reaffirming her determination to keep Germany’s borders open to migrants.

The other is that the European governments and the US have made an enormous bet on the Iranian government being – or at least becoming – moderate, so it would be very inconvenient to find that Shi’ites also can become radicalized terrorists in our midst.

If the tragedy in Munich finally forces people to wake up to the facts about what we’re facing, there will be at least a small silver lining.