It's about 4 degrees out but this makes me feel colder

This from the Guardian (UK).

Three Americans are due to be sentenced next month for their involvement in a plot to explode a cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands of people, in a case that has served as a reminder that homegrown terrorism is still a menace in a country permanently braced for another attack from abroad.

I wrote about the case in early December; this is the link. The Guardian story, however, adds a chilling fact:

It is, however, far from an isolated incident. Mark Potok, who keeps tabs on hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Centre in Alabama, says up to 40 major conspiracies involving domestic terrorism have been uncovered since the 1995 Oklahoma attack by a rightwing war veteran, Timothy McVeigh, which killed 168 people.

One foiled plot, by Ku Klux Klan members in 1997, was aimed at blowing up a Texan oil refinery and could have killed up to 30,000 people in the immediate vicinity.

Many of the people who've commented on this, myself included, have noted the striking fact that few people have heard of such cases and wondered why.

But domestic conspiracies have received much less publicity than foreign threats.

"There is no question at all that had William Krar [the central figure in the case] been a Muslim, this would have been announced from the steps of the justice department," Mr Potok said. The arrests were announced locally in Texas but received hardly any press coverage. ...

The justice department has denied taking domestic terrorism less seriously than foreign threats, saying it pursued all violations vigorously.

But that misses the point. I have no trouble believing that the law enforcement professionals in the DOJ take their jobs seriously and are not ignoring domestic terrorism. Every case of supposed laxity in tracking our native-born wackos can be matched by a slip-up in keeping tabs on some foreign plotter. I realize that's a kind of backhanded defense, saying they've been equally inefficient in both areas, but it does say they haven't been focusing on one to the exclusion of the other.

But again, that's not the point. The point is the political purposes to which the cases are put by the top layers of the department, the shouting about one and the whispering about the other, the nativist and racist fears exploited to advance an agenda. That's the issue that cases such as this raise, that's the issue that we have to face.