Are American right-wing terrorists no longer competitive in their own country? Fifteen years ago, any terrorist plot against the New York Federal Reserve building would surely have been the product of one of our many fine homegrown white-nationalist separatist Christians, trying to stop Barack Maobama's Jewish bankers from taxing white babies. But now foreign-born students are moving here, and beating out our terrorists for some of the best plots: Today, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old Bangladeshi student, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, for attempting to blow up the Fed building 1,000 pounds of explosives. Where's Thomas Friedman when you need him?

Nafis allegedly co-hatched his plot with the number-one terrorist-attack-plotting organization in America, the FBI, an agent of which posted as an al Qaeda operative and provided him with "20 50-pound bags of what he thought were explosives to use in building his bomb." Nafis sounds like he is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed:

Nafis, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, allegedly sought out al-Qaida contacts to help him, unknowingly recruiting an FBI source in the process. At that point, the FBI and NYPD began monitoring him as he developed the plot, prosecutors said.

He also seems unaware of the fact that the only people in the U.S. who know or care about the Fed want it destroyed just as badly as he apparently does. Nafis will be in court later this afternoon.

[NBC New York, image via AP]