The hateful SPLC hate group attacks more honest reporters

Late last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which became deservedly famous in the 1980s for combating violent white-power hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, published a list of 15 individuals it labels as particularly threatening anti-Muslim extremists. It is sad but telling that the SPLC’s so-called field guide to Muslim-haters is not a list of violent extremists—who certainly do exist—but is instead a blacklist of prominent writers whose opinions on a range of cultural and political issues are offensive to the SPLC. The SPLC blacklist list contains practicing Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, foreign-policy think-tankers like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, and right-wing firebrands like David Horowitz—none of whom could be reasonably described as anti-Muslim bigots.

I spoke to Nawaz on the phone in London to ask for his reaction. “A bunch of first-world, comfortable liberal Americans who are not Muslims have decided from their comfortable perch to label me, an activist who is working within his Muslim community to push back against extremism, an anti-Muslim extremist.”

On the face of it, it’s difficult to understand why Nawaz was listed as such. As he told me, he’s a proud Muslim. “I learned Arabic in order to read my holy book,” he said. “In an Intelligence Squared debate, I defended the proposition that Islam was a religion of peace. This was the same week that the man who attempted to bomb Times Square was sentenced so it wasn’t the friendliest New York audience. I hosted Morgan Freeman in a mosque for his documentary The Story of God.”

Nawaz takes the SPLC blacklist seriously, he told me, because he believes that it has put his life in danger. “They’ve put a target on my head,” he said. “This is what putting people on lists does. When Theo Van Gogh was killed in the Netherlands, a list was stuck to his body that included Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s name. It was a hit list. When Bangladeshi reformers were hacked to death by jihadist terrorists, they were working off lists. Only fascists produce lists.”

It’s not easy to understand how the SPLC got here...

In reality, the SPLC’s field guide has little to do with real anti-Muslim extremism, the red-hot center of which these days is not America but Syria—where so-called secular dictator Bashar al-Assad has teamed up with Iran and Russia to slaughter nearly half a million Sunni Arabs. The SPLC document is simply an enemies’ list, of the kind that fascists, Stalinists, and other totalitarian thinkers can’t help producing...

Nor does the SPLC hide the fact that the purpose of its publication is to blacklist and silence its enemies...

Why is a liberal organization like the SPLC now using fascist tactics to blacklist enemies? Maajid Nawaz believes the organization has targeted him for a very specific reason. “The left is no longer about advancing progressive values,” he said. “For them, it’s now about tribal identities, and any internal critique is seen as treachery.” Nawaz also believes there may be another reason—the activists at the SPLC, he suggested, “may be influenced by Islamists themselves.”...

...They wish to silence those who speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, blaming us for a supposed rise in “Islamophobia.”...

The SPLC doesn’t do that because its objective is not really to stop “Islamophobia” at all, but to create the illusion of a powerful and moneyed network of “Islamophobes,” who can only be stopped if you write a check to the SPLC. That’s what this is really all about...

The SPLC’s hit list recurrently excoriates people for making true statements that it apparently regards as self-evidently false. For example, it says that Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch “accuses immigrant-run stores of illegally trafficking in food stamps.” This is a case that Corcoran makes with evidence – evidence that the SPLC doesn’t bother to try disproving. It says that Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism “has claimed that the Obama administration ‘extensively collaborates’ with the Muslim Brotherhood.” That he actually has done so doesn’t seem to bother them...

The facts are once again deeply unfortunate for the SPLC: George Soros funded a report on “Islamophobia” on Twitter and gave $200,000 to the Center for American Progress for a defamatory report on alleged “Islamophobes.” He also spent $600,000 for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant inundation, bought favorable coverage of the Iran deal, and bought “Islamophobia” propaganda after the San Bernardino jihad massacre.

But what need does the SPLC have of facts? It knows its readers won’t check up on the veracity of its claims, but will accept them at face value,

See also the special 2010 issue of The Social Contract featuring articles which illuminate the true nature of the predatory SPLC organization.

Now the faux-hate-peddling money-grubbers at the SPLC are back, this time bashing scholars and activists who have warned America of the national security threat posed by violent jihadist Muslims. The SPLC follows Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, particularly his principle to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” The cheap-shot smears against individuals are straight from the Alinsky playbook.

Until the 9/11 terror attacks, many Americans did not understand that Muslims like Osama bin Laden believe Islam commands its followers to kill unbelievers who refuse to convert.

Earlier this week, the SPLC published a new screed, Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Its list of 15 subjects was rather distinguished, and Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch characterized her inclusion as A Great Honor!

Another chosen one, Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, was less thrilled, writing on his Facebook page, “The non-Muslim led Southern Poverty Law Center placing a jihadi target on my head by listing me (a reforming liberal Muslim) as an ‘anti-Muslim extremist’ on their hit list published today.”

Good work, SPLC, you may get a real scalp from the latest targeting! Sensitive jihadists are easily offended and may murder to protect the strict interpretation of Islam.

The other 13 are: Steven Emerson, Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Geller, John Guandolo, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Horowitz, Ryan Mauro, Robert Muise, Daniel Pipes, Walid Shoebat, and Robert Spencer. These are heroic people who are trying to save America from a determined enemy of 1400 years who want to establish a world Islamic caliphate ruled by totalitarian misogynous sharia. But the SPLC wants to shut them up and thereby endanger America for the organization’s selfish purposes.

The last on the list, Robert Spencer, wrote a response to the SPLC calumny [see above article]...