If al Qaeda threatened to blow up a building anywhere in the United States how long do you suppose it would take before Michael Chertoff and George Bush and Dick Cheney were screaming at the top of their lungs on TV about it?
Probably less time than it takes the Pentagon to spend $1 million in Iraq.
But apparently home-grown racist extremists can threaten to blow up a buildingwith nary a peep from our valiant leaders in the War on Terror.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Southern Poverty Law Center, which filed suit against the nation's second-largest Ku Klux Klan group, has increased security following threats from white supremacists to blow up its building.
The Montgomery-based center filed suit July 25 against the Imperial Klans of America in Kentucky's Meade County Circuit Court over the beating of a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent.
"The latest case against the IKA promises to be as dangerous as anything we've faced," SPLC co-founder Morris Dees stated in an e-mail Monday. "We won't back down from these threats, but we'll have to increase our security to ensure the safety of our staff."
I guess perhaps white supremacists are nothing to get too worked up over, nothing you'd hold a press conference for or hike up the terror alert for or even interrupt a vacation for.
Besides, many on the right would argue that people like the Klan and Tim McVeigh are not bonafide terrorists.
How can you tell a real terrorist? Easy. The real terrorists have names like Muhammed and Abdul and speak Arabic.
The Encyclopedia Britannica would beg to differ.
Ku Klux Klan -- either of two distinct secret terrorist organizations in the United States, one founded immediately after the Civil War and lasting until the 1870s, the other beginning in 1915 and continuing to the present.
But they must not be real terrorists, because they even have their own websites.
Well, even though we can't depend on the government to smash the Klan, at least the SPLC is on the job. The SPLC, you may recall, successfully sued the United Klans into oblivion.
Nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was on his way to the store in 1981 when two members of the United Klans of America abducted him, beat him, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Ala.
Angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict another black man for killing a white police officer in Birmingham, the Klansmen selected Michael Donald at random and lynched him to intimidate and threaten other blacks. On the same evening, other Klan members burned a cross on the Mobile County courthouse lawn.
The two Klansmen who carried out the ritualistic killing were eventually arrested and convicted. Convinced that the Klan itself should be held responsible for the lynching, Center attorneys filed a civil suit on behalf of Donald's mother, Beulah Mae Donald vs. United Klans. In 1987, the Center won an historic $7 million verdict against the men involved in the lynching.
The case against the Imperial Klans involves the beating of a teenager.
The lawsuit claims that as part of an official recruiting drive organized by the leadership of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), several members went to the Meade County Fairgrounds in Brandenburg, Ky., to hand out business cards and flyers advertising a "white-only" IKA function. Unprovoked, two of the Klansmen at the fair began harassing a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent, calling him a "spic," according to the lawsuit. The boy, who stands 5-foot-3 and weighs just 150 pounds, was beaten to the ground and kicked by the Klansmen, one of whom is 6-foot-5 and 300 pounds. The beating left the boy with two cracked ribs, a broken left forearm, multiple cuts and bruises and jaw injuries requiring extensive dental repair.