"The SPLC Defends Its Hate-Group Labeling” | Wall Street Journal

Morris Dees, the founder of SPLC, milks his registered
charity as does his CEO, Richard Cohen. (Source)

LETTER TO WALL STREET JOURNAL:

Richard Cohen, CEO of the SPLC, defends the Center for listing as "hate" groups various anti gay marriage organizations. ("The SPLC Defends Its Hate-Group Labeling"  ($) September 1-3). 

What about the much more dubious labeling of the individuals Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Wayback). Both are knowledgable critics of Islam. Nawaz is still a Muslim, Ali an ex Muslim. They are vastly experienced with the theory and practice of Islam. Today they are important voices trying to develop and amplify the voices of moderation in the Islamic world. To list them as "haters" does immeasurable harm to these endeavors. 

Many people from across the political spectrum have criticised their inclusion on SPLC's self-defined hate list. SPLC's defense of the listings reveals half-understandings of their views and arbitrary acceptance of out-of-context statements by them. 

On Hirsi-Ali, for example, Cohen has said that she called Islam a "death cult". Never mind that such a statement is defensible and at least debatable, there are Muslims themselves who make the claim ("we love death more than you love life").  In any case, it's certainly not "hate speech" no matter Cohen's blathering. 

Hirsi Ali already travels with armed security at all times. Nawaz has regular threats against his life. The bogus SPLC hate listing has made things worse for them both, these brave warriors trying to defang violent Islamism. 

Shame on Cohen and shame on the SPLC!

(230 words)
Yours, etc
pf

PS: what about dubious dealings of the SPLC.  Documented by Chicago University Professor Jerry Coyne (a left-liberal!) at "More on the sleazy behavior of the SPLC", on 2 September 2017. Some of SPLC's financial shenanigans are breathtaking.

Supporting Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Here's a list of the main articles in support of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the wake of the outrageous "listing" of both of them on a list of allegedly "anti-Muslim extremists" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Latest on top.

• The curious case of the blacklisting of Maajid Nawaz. One one of many monkeys. 7 November. 
• Leftist group: Saying Islam has a problem makes you a terrorist. The Federalist. 3 November 
• SPLC: talk our kind of talk, or we will smear you as a bigot.  Why Evolution is True blog, 2 November.
• Branding moderates as 'anti-Muslim', Wall Street Journal,  Editorial, 1 November.
• SPLC receives backlash after placing activist Maajid Nawaz on 'anti-Muslim extremist' list, Yahoo News, 1 November
• Nick Cohen Adds His Voice to the Defence of Maajid Nawaz, Heather Hastie Heather's Homilies, 1 November
• Jerry Coyne on his blog Why Evolution is True. 1 November; 30 October;  29 October
• The white left has issued its first fatwa, Nick Cohen. The Spectator, 31 October
• Maajid Nawaz himself: I'm A Muslim Reformer. Why Am I Being Smeared as an 'Anti-Muslim Extremist'?, Daily Beast, 29 October
• How did Maajid Nawaz end up on a list of 'anti-Muslim extremists?' David Graham, The Atlantic, 29 October
• Maajid Nawaz an "Anti-Muslim Extremist" according to Southern Poverty Law Center. Homo economicus' blog, 28 October
• The Southern Poverty Law Center and the demand for anti-Muslim Bigotry. Amjad Khan, Sedaa.org, 27 November
• The New Anti-Racist Racists, Douglas Murray, Gatestone Institute, 28 October
• Principles and Politics: The Southern Poverty Law Center Loses The Plot, Sarah Haider, The Ex-Muslim, 27 October 
• Maajid Nawaz an "Anti-Muslim Extremist" according to Southern Poverty Law Center, Harry's Place. 27 October

I would like to have seen more defence of some others on the list. Especially Robert Spencer, who is all to often characterised as an "Islamophobe", but is nothing of the sort in my view, and I've seen him in innumerable videos, and read all his books in the last ten years.  He's done his own defence of the scandalous SPLC listing of him along with 14 others (also here).  I call their list lazy, sloppy, tendentious, vicious, vacuous and, well, just plain horrible.  I can't even bring myself to link to their list.

LATER (3 November 2016): Sam Harris’s talk with Ayaan Hirsi Ali was published just yesterday.  It was done literally on the day of the SPLC slime piece was published, so it does not talk about it, except for Sam as an epilogue in the last five minutes.  

As Sam says, their talk shows just what a thoughtful, empathetic, non-bigot of a person Ayaan is.  But the SPLC just doesn't care.  I guess they care about the fact they got lots of hits and clicks. 

Here's Sam's talk with Ayaan.

My email post to the SPLC (There are other responses to the SPLC on Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution is True):

To Southern Poverty Law Center, 

I've seen your defenses of the now infamous "list" of allegedly "anti-Muslim extremists" and none of what's said in the various boilerplates makes any sense.

Is there anything that would change your mind, especially about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali?  Anything?  

It's clear from what's in your OP and in subsequent email justifications, that you don't really know anything about Maajid and Ayaan.  So, shame on you for that. 

Perhaps you ought to spend some time to look at what they say. The latest for Maajid is to see the Why Evolution is True blog, their post of 2 November.  And for Ayaan, have a listen to Sam Harriss' talk with her, posted on 2 November, but recorded before all this kerfuffle.   

Mind you, that podcast is nearly an hour long, which may well be longer than your attentions span. (given what I've read of your so-called "reasons" for putting all these folk on a hit-list, reason characterised by lack of serious research, and third-person half-quoted obloquies). 

Forgive me for the ad hominem, but really.... you need to get a head screwed on to your body on this one, and shame on all of SPLC for this travesty. 

Peter Forsythe
Hong Kong

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Demand for Anti-Muslim Bigotry – SEDAA – Our Voices

I first read, via Sam Harris' Twitter, about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s labelling of Maajid Nawaz as an "anti-Muslim extremist".

This is complete nonsense. Maajid speaks for moderation in Islam, having once been jailed for his own Islamist extremism.

SPLC's listing of Aayan Hirsi Ali is also nonsense. I've read all her books and articles. She is a powerful voice for women's rights in Islam.

I read SPLC's write ups on these two, and found them mean-spirited and tendentious. Clearly dishonest. I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal, but now don't need to as it's been done by Amjad Khan here: SEDAA gets stuck into SPLC.

SPLC is a hard-Left outfit. On this issue of critics of the ideology of Islam it can safely be ignored. It is Hard-Left biased. 

Note that SPLC list "hate groups", but not a single one is Islamist or jihadist…. As if!

Southern Poverty Law Centre indicted. Good.

Good, I'm glad they've been indicted. They're a crooked outfit. A scm. 

The charge? Fraud. 

The SPLC did good work at the beginning of its existence. They were a bunch of lawyers who set out to sue the Ku Klux Klan to oblivion. They pretty much succeeded in that. 

So much so, that they ran out of "White Extremists" to go after. The Klan is pretty much non-existent. 

So the SPLC helped to create and fund White Supremacist groups. That's the charge. And that's how Joe Biden was able to say, falsely, that "white supremacism is the biggest terrorist threat to America".  

I've written about the SPLC for over ten years. They went after two brave ex-Muslims in Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That was most unfair and ridiculous. But just a small part of the big pic of how they went about fund raising, by funding extremist groups and then pointing to them: "See the challenge we've got! Money please!"

Here's some of my posts, going back over ten years. I've been leery about this outfit for ages. While, of course, the mainstream media is painting this a just the Trump admin going after them for "political reasons". What happened to "no one is above the law"?

Here are the guys from the Ruthless Podcast talking about it yesterday 

And the ALL-IN podcast at 1:00:32. SPLC "are basically running a grift", David Sacks. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Demand for Anti-Muslim Bigotry – SEDAA – Our Voices

I first read, via Sam Harris' Twitter, about the Southern Poverty Law Centre's labeling of Maajid Nawaz as an "anti-Muslim extremist".
This is complete nonsense. Maajid speaks for moderation in Islam, having once been jailed for his own Islamist extremism.
SPLC's listing of Aayan Hirsi Ali is also nonsense. I've read all her books and articles. She is a powerful voice for women's rights in Islam.
I read SPLC's write ups on these two, and found them mean-spirited and tendentious. Clearly dishonest. I was going to do a point by point rebuttal, but now don't need to as it's been done by Mr Khan below.
SPLC is a hard left outfit and on this issue of critics if the ideology of Islam can be safely ignored. Note that they list "hate groups", but not a single one is Islamist or jihadist.
Sedaa gets stuck into them

Nonprofits manufacture problems to stay in business

Relating to my recent post on the SPLC. The "Southern Poverty Law Centre".

And about why the Left hates Elon Musk. Basically they hate him because in his time at DOGE, he was trying to expose and cut Waste, Fraud and Abuse. 

While the Dems rely on Waste, Fraud and Abuse. It's their money machine. It's the NGO Industrial Complex. It's their laundromat. Their money laundering. 

Below some words on all this, from the four smart guys at the All-in podcast:

David Sacks:

“Here's the systemic problem with nonprofits and NGOs.

Let me just contrast it with business.

In business, you set up a company, the company has to make revenue, it has to make profits.

And if it doesn't, it's going to go out of business, right? Because it'll lose money.

So there's a feedback mechanism from the market.

With an NGO, nonprofit, what have you, they raise money. They don't sell things.

They fundraise from donors in order to engage in an activity, but what happens over time is the actual activities may stop mattering, and all that really matters is they're able to keep fundraising, right?

Because they're just trying to figure out a justification to keep going back to donors to get more and more money out of them.

That's what perpetuates the organization.”

Chamath:

“ Why wouldn't the Southern Poverty Law Center focus on southern poverty? Which is an issue that actually still exists in some shape or form.

Why do you call it one thing, focus on racism, and then all of a sudden whip up fake racism?”

Sacks:

“I do think that at one time in this country, civil rights was a noble cause, a very legitimate cause.

We had the legacy of segregation and Jim Crow, and there were groups that were set up to basically change that, and they succeeded.

But again, no one in an NGO or a nonprofit ever declares victory.

When Obama got elected in 2008, regardless of whether you liked Obama or not, or agreed with his politics, I thought that at that point, most people could see that this was not a racist country.

Whatever else you could say, the fact that the highest office in the land was not denied to anybody showed that this country was not holding people back based on their skin color.

And instead of just basically packing up shop and saying, ‘Okay, we've achieved our goal,’ the goalposts all got moved.

Remember, that's when the whole anti-racism thing started, was around Obama's second term.

If they just said at that time, ‘You know what, we're going to move the goalposts from equality of opportunity to equality of results. We're going to basically make everyone equal at the finish line,’ which is to say, identity socialism.

People would've said, ‘Eh, no, we're not on board for that.’

So instead, they created this whole new terminology to justify it.

And it's taken us years to unpack that and realize what's really going on.

ADDED: SPLC creating the racism it was set up to fight.  

Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate | Wall Street Journal

A long article on one of my favourite women: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the apostate from Islam, and brave spokeswoman for liberal values.  For that she's smeared often by those on the "regressive left" and various other Islamapologists and fellow travellers.

I've pasted the whole article below, with thanks to the Wall Street Journal.

By Tunku Varadarajan
The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.

The West’s obsession with ‘terror’ has been a mistake, she argues. Dawa, the ideology behind it, is a broader threat.

Ms. Hirsi Ali has come a long way from the days when she— “then a bit of a hothead”—declared Islam to be incapable of reform, while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether. That was a contentious decade ago. Today she believes that Islam can indeed be reformed, that it must be reformed, and that it can be reformed only by Muslims themselves—by those whom she calls “Mecca Muslims.” These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam that she says was “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622. That was the year he migrated to Medina and the religion took a militant and unlovely ideological turn.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali— now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes. She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.” To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.”

Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself: “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”

Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11. “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.”

There is a knock on the door. I hear hushed voices outside, presumably her bodyguard telling someone to come back later. To add to the mildly dramatic effect, a siren is audible somewhere in the distance, unusual for the serene Stanford campus. Ms. Hirsi Ali is unfazed. “What the Islamists call jihad,” she continues, “is what we call terrorism, and our preoccupation with it is, I think, a form of overconfidence. ‘Terrorism is the way of the weak,’ we tell ourselves, ‘and if we can just take out the leaders and bring down al Qaeda or ISIS, then surely the followers will stop their jihad.’ But we’re wrong. Every time Western leaders take down a particular organization, you see a different one emerge, or the same one take on a different shape. And that’s because we’ve been ignoring dawa.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali wants us to get away from this game of jihadi Whac-A-Mole and confront “the enemy that is in plain sight—the activists, the Islamists, who have access to all the Western institutions of socialization.” She chuckles here: “That’s a horrible phrase … ‘institutions of socialization’ … but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains. And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.”

America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution”—with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations. “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage. We mean that they want gays put to death.”

Islam the religion, in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s view, is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement. Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents “enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.” Ms. Hirsi Ali is not afraid to call these groups out. Her book names five including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asserts—and in turn receives in the mainstream media—the status of a moderate Muslim organization. But groups like CAIR, Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “take advantage of the focus on ‘inclusiveness’ by progressive political bodies in democratic societies, and then force these societies to bow to Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.”

Her strategy to fight dawa evokes several parallels with the Western historical experience of radical Marxism and the Cold War. Islamism has the help of “useful idiots”—Lenin’s phrase— such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has denounced Ms. Hirsi Ali as an “extremist.” She sees that smear as a success for dawa: “They go to people like the SPLC and say, ‘Can we partner with you, because we also want to talk about what you guys talk about, which is civil rights. And Muslims are a minority, just like you.’ So, they play this victim card, and the SPLC swallows it. And it’s not just them, it’s also the ACLU. The Islamists are infiltrating all these institutions that were historic and fought for rights. It’s a liberal blind spot.”

Western liberals, she says, are also complicit in an Islamist cultural segregation. She recalls a multiculturalist catchphrase from her years as a Somali refugee in Amsterdam in the early 1990s: “ ‘Integrate with your own identity,’ they used to tell us—Integratie met eigen identiteit. Of course, that resulted in no integration at all.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali wants the Trump administration—and the West more broadly—to counter the dawa brigade “just as we countered both the Red Army and the ideology of communism in the Cold War.” She is alarmed by the ease with which, as she sees it, “the agents of dawa hide behind constitutional protections they themselves would dismantle were they in power.” She invokes Karl Popper, the great Austrian-British philosopher who wrote of “the paradox of tolerance.” Her book quotes Popper writing in 1945: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali what her solution might be, and she leans once more on Popper, who proposed a right not to tolerate the intolerant. “Congress must give the president—this year, because there’s no time to lose—the tools he needs to dismantle the infrastructure of dawa in the U.S.” Dawa has become an existential menace to the West, she adds, because its practitioners are “working overtime to prevent the assimilation of Muslims into Western societies. It is assimilation versus dawa. There is a notion of ‘cocooning,’ by which Islamists tell Muslim families to cocoon their children from Western society. This can’t be allowed to happen.”

Is Ms. Hirsi Ali proposing to give Washington enhanced powers to supervise parenting? “Yes,” she says. “We want these children to be exposed to critical thinking, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rights of women.” She also suggests subjecting immigrants and refugees to ideological scrutiny, so as to deny entry, residence and naturalization to those “involved with, or supportive of, Islamism.”

In effect, Ms. Hirsi Ali would modernize the “communism test” that still applies to those seeking naturalization. “I had to answer questions when I applied for citizenship in 2013: ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a communist?’ And I remember thinking, ‘God, that was the war back then. We’re supposed to update this stuff!’ Potential immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, for instance, should have to answer questions—‘Are you a member of the Jamat?’ and so on. If they’re from the Middle East you ask them about the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘or any other similar group,’ so there’s no loophole.”

Might critics deride this as 21st century McCarthyism? “That’s just a display of intellectual laziness,” Ms. Hirsi Ali replies. “We’re dealing here with a lethal ideological movement and all we are using is surveillance and military means? We have to grasp the gravity of dawa. Jihad is an extension of dawa. For some, in fact, it is dawa by other means.”

The U.S., she believes, is in a “much weaker position to combat the various forms of nonviolent extremism known as dawa because of the way that the courts have interpreted the First Amendment”—a situation where American exceptionalism turns into what she calls an “exceptional handicap.” Convincing Americans of this may be the hardest part of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s campaign, and she knows it. Yet she asks whether the judicial attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s—themselves a reaction to the excesses of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—might have left the U.S. ill-equipped to suppress threats from groups that act in the name of religion.

I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali if there’s any one thing she would wish for. “I would like to be present at a conversation between Popper and Muhammad,” she says. “Popper wrote about open society and its enemies, and subjected everyone from Plato to Marx to his critical scrutiny. I’d have liked him to subject Muhammad’s legacy to the same analysis.

“But he skipped Muhammad, alas. He skipped Muhammad.”

Mr. Tunku Varadarajan is a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

How Did Maajid Nawaz End Up on a List of 'Anti-Muslim Extremists'? - The Atlantic

More on the infamy of SPLC putting Maajid on a list of "anti-Muslim extremists".

This one strikes me as a rather tepid defence of Maajid. Going to a strip joint, by a young man is "tasteless"??  Never been to one, writer of this article? 

Anyway note how the SPLJ guy reacts, it's pathetic.

How Did Maajid Nawaz End Up on a List of 'Anti-Muslim Extremists'?

When earlier this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center and three other groups released a list of 15 "anti-Muslim extremists," many of the names came as no surprise. They included Pam Geller, who led the fight against the misleadingly nicknamed Ground Zero mosque, and her ally Frank Gaffney, who has called Barack Obama a crypto-Muslim and assailed Grover Norquist as a Islamist agent.

"One person shot dead in Portland following clashes between pro-Trump supporters, counterprotesters"

That’s the headline of the daily Washington Post article that was delivered to my inbox on Monday.

What the article doesn’t tell you, which was known at the time:

• The Trump supporter was killed by a man who describes himself “100% Antifa, all the way”.
• He was killed at point-blank range, after the Antifa guy had shouted “we got Trumpie here!”.  It was an execution. (It’s all in video).
• Portland has been experiencing nightly rioting, looting and arson for 97 days, without break. 
• Many other cities in the US -- eg. Seattle, LA, Chicago, Washington DC -- have suffered the same, also for long periods, all are Democrat-run by leaders who have enabled the lawlessness. In all of these crime rates have gone up at double to triple digit rates.
• Portland (and others) have refused federal offers of assistance to stop the rioting, looting and arson.
• The nightly “mayhem” (as WaPo and NYT call it), is promoted, defended, and glorified by Antifa and the BLM movement, and carried out by their supporters. The Patriot Prayer counter demo people only came to Portland that day.
• Patriot Prayer describe themselves as supporters of “freedom, love and peace”. The description of them as “far-right” is based on Wikipedia, in turn based on SPLC, which is now discredited, as even WaPo acknowledges. (I don’t doubt PP are conservative, religious, Trump supporters. But the claim that they are “alt-right” or “far right" is based on a series of ipse-dixit mutually supporting statements).
• Jacob Blake, shot in Kenosha, was wanted for domestic violence. His estranged partner had rung 911 saying he had raped her (violating a domestic restraining order). When police arrived, he resisted arrest, they tasered him, he continued to resist arrest and was reaching for a knife in the front floor of the car when he was shot. (Whatever we non-Americans think about crazy US gun laws, lawyers in the US say this is a “good” shooting: ie, justified, and the police will not be charged).
• Rittenhouse was not part of a militia group. He was medically trained and helping injured rioters. He was openly carrying a semi-automatic weapon, legal in the state of Wisconsin (yes, amazing!). He was “outed” as non-Antifa, he ran, was chased by several men, who shot at him. Rittenhouse returned fire and killed two of his pursuers, Young white men. (There’s video of this).

All of these are known facts, to the extent that we can know facts in these heated times. WaPo chose to ignore them. Does any of it make a difference? Perhaps that depends on one’s own perception. I rather think it ought be part of the story, for context, at the very least. Biden has since come out to condemn violence, but without mentioning the main instigators, Antifa and BLM.