The forgotten terrorists

David Neiwert focuses on the latest gang of forgotten terrorists:

Meanwhile, when a group of actual terrorists is arrested as they prepare to strike in the American heartland … well, the media mostly snooze.

But as usual, it may have something to do with the fact that they were the wrong color:

Marvin Hall of Rimersburg, Perry Landis of the Clarion area, Morgan Jones of Lucinda, as well as Melissa Huet are in custody.

Investigators say they were stockpiling a cache of weapons with plans to target local government buildings.

The FBI, in raids over the weekend, confiscated hundreds of weapons – including everything from hunting rifles, homemade bombs, rudimentary rockets and cannons.

Sources tell KDKA’s Marty Griffin the suspects made threats to blow up government buildings and carry out other extreme acts of domestic terrorism.

Imagine, if you will, how this would have been handled were these folks of Arab extraction or believers in radical Islamist ideology instead of your garden-variety far-right American ideology. CNN would have the cameras and reporters there, NBC would host an hour discussing the threat, and Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs’ Chuck Johnson would bouncing around the walls of their rubber rooms even more frenetically than usual amid shouts of “Jihad!!!!”

Some of the worst damage inflicted by the events of 9/11 was the wreckage to the public’s already limited understanding of the nature of terrorism. Because ever since then, terrorism has been about Scary Brown Foreign People—despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks planned and carried out on American soil are by white Americans.

The media and the far-right loons collaborate in hyping the threat of the Terrifying Brown People™ beyond all reasonable proportions. It’s all about fear, folks: be afraid, be afraid, BE AFRAID twenty-four hours a day.

And of course, when fear rules, no rational thought can take place. That’s the whole point.