Sense of balance

So, AP lets us know, Zacarias Moussaoui

pleaded guilty Friday to helping al-Qaida carry out the Sept. 11 hijackings and said he understood he could be put to death for his role in the deadliest terror attack in American history.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema accepted the plea, making the French citizen the lone person convicted in a U.S. court for the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

A legal victory in the War on Terrorism^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)}, certainly. But a more significant such victory was won, with less fanfare but not, let it be noted, without press attention, the previous week when

[f]ormer fugitive Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty on Wednesday[, April 13,] to the bombing of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and a string of subsequent blasts, citing a hatred of abortion, gay rights and the federal government as his motivation for the attacks.

Rudolph, who expressed no remorse and offered no apology, issued an 11-page statement justifying his bloody reign that killed two and wounded 150 more over the course of four blasts, a statement that

is at once an attempt to influence history and a thinly veiled call to arms.

So thinly veiled, in fact, that

federal officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are calling US clinics to make sure their security is up to date.

Unlike our political misleaders, law-enforcement authorities - by which I mean the people on the ground, doing the actual work, not the professional bigwigs in their plush offices - and others involved do take the threat of domestic terrorism seriously. The case of William Krar, after all, involved the biggest manhunt since Oklahoma City. What's more, they know that there are more McVeighs, more Rudolphs, more Krars out there.

Independent groups that monitor extremist activity inside the United States say that while the country has focused since 2001 on the threat from foreign terrorists, domestic operatives like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh have not gone away and, in some ways, are more dangerous than ever.

For officials at the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, it is the sad fact inherent in work intended to honor the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. What happened here, they know, could happen again.

"It will happen," said Ken Thompson, the institute's external affairs director. Thompson's mother was killed in the blast at the Murrah building, and he now works in an office overlooking the memorial pool and the rows of sculptural chairs representing each victim.

"I don't know that anyone can expect that the federal government can stop 100 percent of the attacks," he said. "We know it will happen again, and the most important thing we can do is be better prepared to respond and bring the people to justice than we have in the past."

That's why Rudolph's case is the more significant of the two: He is part of, an expression of, an ideology of paranoid hatred and violence that simmers below the surface of our society. It bubbles up and cools down, but it never disappears. Yet it's an ideology that we usually ignore or downplay, perhaps because the perpetrators are Americans and so it's a step harder to define them as "other," leaving us xenophobically fixated on the threat from "foreigners." More to the point and for that same reason, there is less political gain to be had, especially for the right wing, in playing up those of Rudolph's ilk. No point in antagonizing the base, yes? (To make the point, it's sufficient to note that if Moussaoui had made a statement equivalent to Rudolph's, it would have been headline news for weeks. MSNBC would be running "America Under Threat: Day" whatever and Brit Hume would be wondering why Muhammad Ali is not in Gitmo.)

And so when - I say, when - it happens again, when the next Rudolph or McVeigh strikes, we will be just as politically unprepared as we were the last time, just as ready, even eager, to blame "outsiders." (In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the New York Times intoned darkly that there are mosques in the city.) Fortunately, in the OKC case it almost immediately became obvious that it was a right-wing job. Next time, both Muslims and our civil liberties, already under assault, may not be so "lucky."

Footnote, A Sense of Priorities Div.: The FBI considers "ecological extremism" the top domestic terrorist threat, holding groups such as the Earth Liberation Front

responsible for more than 1,100 criminal acts and $110 million in damage since the mid-1970s.

On the other hand, this "extremism" has not resulted in a single death, while

in the decade since the Oklahoma City bombing, 15 law enforcement officers have been killed by anti-government extremists or white supremacists.

And of course there are the others killed or injured by Rudolph and like-minded fanatics. So I guess what makes something your "top threat" is a moral as well as a practical judgment.

Footnote, A Sense of Responsibility Div.: Commenting on Rudolph's guilty plea, Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said

"I would concur with his opinion that abortion is murder. However, his frustration that leads to violence is never an acceptable way to accept this."

Of course. These are the people who declaim that abortion is "murder," call doctors "baby killers," shout about a "holocaust," scream in the faces of women entering abortion clinics - but when someone takes them at their word, when someone accepts their logic and acts on it, suddenly they turn into a cross between Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all horrified denunciations of exactly the response their own words clearly encourage. They are utterly shameless.