TWO INCIDENTS occurred on July 28. Both took place on the West Coast; both involved an American venting his hostility to Jews. But only one of them became, in the days that followed, the big national story about anti-Semitism. The other was treated as a serious but local matter, and drew only modest coverage around the country.

Incident A involved a guy spewing crude anti-Semitic slurs when he was arrested for drunk driving; after sobering up, he publicly and profusely apologized. Incident B involved a Muslim gunman's premeditated assault on a prominent Jewish institution; his attack left one woman dead and sent five to the hospital, three of them in critical condition.

Which would you say was the bigger story?...

...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?"