It’s risible, but highly profitable, for them to lump conservative groups in with real haters. My piece in FrontPage today:
Rest easy: the nation’s watchdogs, patented Hate Detectors gripped in their sweaty palms, are still on the job. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has released its latest report on hate groups, and while the numbers of these vile entities has decreased, the SPLC solons assure us they’re scarier than ever: Mark Potok of the SPLC, trying his best to affect a stiff-backed Joe Friday pose conveying grim and unimpeachable authority, declared: “The radical right is growing leaner and meaner. The numbers are down somewhat, but the potential for violence remains high.” In other words, keep those checks coming, folks!
And they do. The SPLC took in over $38 million in 2011; the previous year, its CEO Richard Cohen earned $351,648, and its notorious Chief Trial Counsel, Morris Dees, pulled in a cool $346,919. All that to keep you safe from the likes of…me. The SPLC lists my website Jihad Watch (www.jihadwatch.org) as a hate group, along with the American Freedom Defense Initiative, of which I am vice president, and its Stop Islamization of America program. My colleague Pamela Geller founded AFDI/SIOA; the SPLC also lists her website Atlas Shrugs (www.pamelageller.com), along with our international umbrella group Stop Islamization of Nations, as hate groups — so Pamela Geller and I are both four hate groups, and between us are responsible for five hate groups. Two people. We are also both the subject of lavish and arguably libelous profiles as “hate group leaders.” The brilliant FrontPage writer Daniel Greenfield’s blog Sultan Knish (http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/) is listed as another hate group. That’s six hate groups, three people. “Leaner and meaner,” indeed!
This demonstrates how risible the SPLC’s claim that there are 939 hate groups currently operating in the U.S. The very label “hate group” conjures up images of KKK members in robes, their venal and stupid faces illumined by the flame of a burning cross – not columnists, commentators, and human rights activists dedicated to defending the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the principle of the equality of rights of all people before the law.
But that’s the idea. The SPLC’s objective is not to spur rational discussion or debate about what exactly constitutes a “hate group,” and what are or should be the parameters of acceptable political discourse. It is to manipulate people into thinking that mild-mannered writers such as Daniel Greenfield and human rights activists like Pamela Geller are indeed exactly the same as those cross-burning Klansmen, and to be equally as shunned and marginalized.
The SPLC’s Hate Groups list is a cudgel, a tool for the use of Leftist enemies of the freedom of speech. When Pamela Geller or I or some other “hate group leader” is invited to speak somewhere, Leftists and Islamic supremacists avid to shut down honest discussion of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism contact the event organizers, tell them that the SPLC classifies us as “hate group leaders,” and all too often, ignorant or cowardly officials, unaware of or indifferent to how they’re being played and anxious to avoid “controversy,” cancel the event. It works like a charm, in just the way it was intended to work.
These classifications, unsurprisingly, have also become a staple of every report from lazy Leftist journalists. By citing the SPLC as if it were a reliable source, they encourage an uncritical, uninformed public to see its targets as worthy of the opprobrium the Center heaps upon them. It is no surprise that reporters, who tend almost universally to be Leftists, take for granted that the SPLC is some kind of neutral observer, when actually the SPLC is a far-Left attack outfit, using its “hate group” classifications to stigmatize and demonize foes of its political agenda. In these days of the New Black Panthers and the Occupy movement, it lists no Leftist groups as hate groups. Nor does it include any significant number of Islamic jihad groups on the hate group list, and has now even dropped an Ohio branch of the racist, violent and paranoid Nation of Islam from the list.
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