Horrific anti-Muslim terrorist plot thwarted: "We will cut them to shreds."

Maybe I am the last to hear about this.  A group based in Tennessee and led by a gentleman named Robert Doggart had planned to attack a Muslim community near Hancock, NY (right in the middle of the state).  They had planned to burn the Muslims' buildings and were prepared for massive violence.  They planned to arm themselves* with assault rifles, explosives and machetes.

"If it gets down to the machete, we will cut them to shreds," Doggart said on a call intercepted by the FBI, according to a criminal complaint.

Doggart's rhetoric is hard to separate from the rhetoric of ISIS:

“Our small group will soon be faced with the fight of our lives,” Doggart wrote in another Facebook post. “We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God. We shall be Warriors who will inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace.”

The complaint also referenced an intercepted phone call in which Doggart told a woman: “When we meet with this state, the people that we will seek will know who we are. We will be cruel to them. And we will burn down their buildings."

Fortunately, Doggart was arrested on April 10.  (Why did I not hear of this until today?)  He has just agreed to plead guilty of a single charge of "interstate communication of a threat" and faces up to 5 years in jail.  He is currently out on bail.

Three observations:

(1) Apparently this particular Muslim community has been subject to hate incitement on Fox news, with claims on O'Reilly's program that the community has been engaging in terrorist preparations -- claims which the local police sheriff says are false.

(2) The obvious -- I think if a bunch of Muslims had been caught planning half of this attack on a Christian community, the prosecution would not have the warm and fuzzy approach that this fellow has received.  The lot of them would be sitting in solitary right now, awaiting a life sentence in a SuperMax.

(3) Once again -- why am I just hearing about this now?  If this was going in the other direction, it would be on CNN 24/7, not to mention Fox News.

[A thanks to Mike S., who corrected my on Mr. Doggart's political affiliation.] [Also, edited sentence marked "*" because G2geek pointed out that it's not clear from the linked article if they already had their weapons in hand at the time of the arrest.  I changed "were arming themselves" to "were planning to arm themselves."]