Seventeen soldiers in the armed forces of a Western European nation conspire to “destablize” the government that gave them their military training. They’re crazed with the conviction that Jews are responsible for all their people’s troubles. They make no distinction between Israel and the Zionist secret agents they believe run the rest of the non-Muslim world. Fortunately, police foil the sleeper cell with a dramatic raid on the army barracks the conspirators had infiltrated. Unfortunately, they discover that the group had a massive weapons stockpile and plans to use it — does anyone believe they’re the only ones in this network of terror?

Sounds like a story, right? Well, it is — in the media of Israel, Turkey, and a few other Muslim countries, reported in Britain, headlined in the International Herald-Tribune.

And that’s about it.

Another case of the liberal, head-in-the-sand media ignoring the threat to European democracy poised by “Islamicization”? Well, no. The seventeen soldiers are Belgian by ethnicity as well as citizenship, and their anti-Semitic lunacy is a grand old European tradition. They’re Nazis.

The fact that this isn’t a bigger story, in Europe or America, reveals the true meaning of “terror” as used by most of the media: militant Islam. That there are militant Islamist groups bent on destruction is indisputable. But so, too, is the ongoing presence in the “enlightened” nations of homegrown terrorism. The spirit of Timothy McVeigh lives on. Indeed, eleven years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the investigation meant to uncover McVeigh’s collaborators is cold. Meanwhile, organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center say that the number of domestic hate groups willing to commit violence has actually increased since 9/11.

But that story has no place in the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative that permeates the press. Nobody likes a Nazi, of course, but “Islamofascism” is the rage among pundits these days, and for that story to play, the traditional fascism that poisons the far right edge of the political spectrum must be dismissed as a fringe religion.

By the numbers, Timothy McVeigh’s beliefs were fringe indeed, even if they continue to be echoed in the rhetoric of verbal bomb-throwers such as Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. But then, strictly by the numbers, Osama bin Laden’s beliefs are fringe, as well — it’s a very small minority of Muslims who believe that the murder of noncombatants, including other Muslims, is the right way to fight what many see as American imperialism.

What both men proved is that it does not take a belief system of broad-based appeal to create wide-spread terror. That doesn’t mean that the press should respond to neo-Nazi terror plots with the same know-nothing sensationalism with which it typically reports on militant Islamist terror plots, but it does mean that it should scrap the “Clash of Civilizations” meme that continues to shape news even as any number of media organizations have proclaimed their dedication to more nuanced approaches.

The Clash thesis isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous. A replication of Cold War theology, it obscures schisms and considers Religion, capital R, a synonym for ideology. It reduces actual lived religion to official doctrine, and it paints conflicts of many factions, splitting not just along religious lines but also along racial and political and historical fractures, as simple dichotomies, leaving the public with a knowledge gap as big as the hole at Ground Zero — or the crater created by one American fascist’s truck full of fertilizer in Oklahaoma City.

In Belgium, a two-year police investigation stopped something similar from happening. But the press’ construction of a big picture narrative for terrorism insures that little terrorists cells like the 17 racists in Belgium can continue to flourish in the darkness at the edge of the official story about the “West,” the “Islamicization” of Europe, and the present danger.

–Jeff Sharlet