Nutty British star Russell Brand took to the pages of The Sun today to pretend that there is no relationship between radical Islam and the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by Islamists in Woolwich. Brand tweeted within hours of the murder, “That bloke is a nut. A nut who happens to be Muslim. Blaming Muslims for this is like blaming Hitler’s moustache for the Holocaust.”

Actually, Russell, it isn’t. Blaming Islamism for what happened to Lee Rigby is sort of like blaming Nazism for the Holocaust. In other words, it’s accurate. But Brand believes that only the insane take murderous action. “In spite of his dispassionate intoning the subject is not rational,” licensed psychiatrist Brand wrote in The Sun. “Of course he’s not rational, he’s just murdered a stranger in the street, he says, because of a book. In my view that man’s severely mentally ill and has found a convenient conduit for his insanity – in this case the Koran.”

Brand actually compared the Islamist murderers to John Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, who said he was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye. Neither book, said Brand, could be linked with murder. “I’ve read that book and I’ve read some of the Koran, and nothing in either of them has compelled me to do violence,” wrote Brand.

Except, of course, that there isn’t an entire movement of would-be murderers and murder-sympathizers who claim their authority from Salinger. There are millions of such would-be murderers and murder supporters around the globe who claim authority from the Koran.

So what does cause mass movements for murder? Brand, in pure Marxist fashion, wrote that the answer is poverty. “What I think is that all over our country, all over our planet, there are huge numbers of people who feel alienated and sometimes victimised by the privileged and the powerful, whether that’s rich people, powerful corporations or occupying nations,” he wrote. Then he compared Islamists to Christians who are anti-homosexuality. Because of that vast spate of bombings and beheadings at gay clubs by Bible thumpers.

But, said Brand, the good news is that all these books are good. The Bible and the Koran can both be boiled down to “Be nice to each other because we’re all the same.”

Finally, Brand argued that the Muslims who beheaded a British soldier on the streets of Woolwich were exactly the same as the English Defence League members who marched on the same streets to stop such beheadings. “The extremists on both sides have a shared agenda, cause division, distrust, anger and violence. Both sides have the same intention. We cannot allow them to distort our perception,” he wrote.

So, what’s the answer to Islamist terror, according to Brand? To be “loving and compassionate to one another …. The murderers want angry patriots to desecrate mosques and perpetuate violence. How futile their actions seem if we instead leave flowers at each other’s places of worship.” Give a puppy to Osama, stop 9/11.

It is precisely this sort of idiocy that paves the way for the beheading of Westerners by Islamists. Islamists are motivated by ideology. They are not all crazy. And no matter how nice we are to them – what did Lee Rigby do to his murderers? – they will come after us.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).