An honest mistake

Via Little Green Footballs comes this story about the attack upon a young woman and her baby in a train near Paris by anti-Semitic men of North African origin. The twist is that the woman apparently isn’t Jewish. The thugs thought she was because, as one put it, “only Jews live in the 16th district.” The 16th district is an upscale part of Paris and does not contain Paris’ main Jewish quarter.
It sounds like these guys just wanted to rough up and rob this woman, and decided she was Jewish in order to feel better about themselves for doing so. I suspect this type of thought process may be prevalent among fundamentalist terrorists as well. They have a psychotic desire to engage in violence and destruction. Jihad provides a “respectable” outlet, but the root cause is the psychosis.