Gatorade. Or maybe Powerade And an MP3 player. Or a cell phone.

That’s all the terrorists plotting in Britain would need to mix with an explosive gel to blow up a jet flying between the United Kingdom and the United States. But intelligence operatives from Britain and Pakistan were up to the task of sniffing out the putative plot Thursday and stopping it cold. The world let out a sigh and a cheer. Fox News called it “a major victory in the war on terror” and I’m inclined to agree with everything short of the word “war.”

The great good news from our allies is almost certain to push another breakthrough of equal significance much closer to home off the front pages. Let Reuters tell the tale:

“Two 20-year-old men arrested in Ohio were being held on Thursday on charges of money laundering on behalf of Hezbollah, authorities said. The two men, Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, of Dearborn, Michigan, were apprehended on Tuesday in Marietta, Ohio, during a traffic stop and found carrying $11,000 in cash, 12 cell phones, airline passenger lists and information on airport security, a spokesman for the Washington County prosecutor’s office said.”

The suspects stand accused of trying to resell hundreds of the phones in Dearborn to finance the terrorist Hezbollah organization, the same group pushing back against Israel in the war against the same terrorist group in Lebanon. The Dearborn news hit home especially hard for anyone who has seen or heard Steve Emerson, author of “American Jihad,” talk about the prevalence of Islamic Jihadism within American mosques and the domestic Muslim community. I had a chance to hear Emerson, executive director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, give an off-the-record briefing at a fund-raiser at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen last week, and it was more than enough to make your hair curl.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but the Jihadists want to kill us because we are the sect of unbelievers known as “the infidel.” We deserve to die, according to their creed, and the question for those on the left and right both is whether the right to freedom of speech encompasses the right to overthrow the country that believes in freedom above all else.

On my “Con Games” radio show a few weeks ago, a woman named Nonnie Darwish, an Egytian-American who founded the group Arabs For Israel, said the anti-American virulence of the mosques she visited in the United States made her swear off Islam.

Freedom of speech is not absolute, and the horrors posed by Islamic Fundamentalists are a near and present danger in Dearborn and across the fruited plain, according to Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism. Much of the money promoting Jihadism has flowed into the mosques from Saudi Arabia, who sells us oil and then puts a chunk of the money into exporting Islamic extremism, according to “War Footing,” a book by Frank Gaffney.

Even with 9/11—and arrests like those in Dearborn—Americans have remained blissfully ignorant of the Jihadist threats within, the homegrown terrorists who want to blows us up and themselves in the bargain. The news from England gives one hope the terrorists can be stopped—but only if we take the time to look right over our shoulder at the danger within.