{"id":64419,"date":"2017-01-26T10:12:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T14:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=64419"},"modified":"2017-01-26T10:16:29","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T14:16:29","slug":"southern-poverty-law-center-the-ultimate-hate-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=64419","title":{"rendered":"Southern Poverty Law Center: The Ultimate Hate Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE HATE GROUP THAT TRACKS DOWN ‘HATE GROUPS’<\/h1>\n
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The despicable Southern Poverty Law Center.<\/h3>\n


\nJohn Perazzo
\nwww.frontpagemag.com<\/p>\n

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 by two Alabama attorneys, Morris Dees<\/a> and Joseph Levin Jr. The latter served as the Center’s\u00a0legal director<\/a>\u00a0from 1971-76, but it was Dees, who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, who would emerge as the long-term \u201cface\u201d of the organization.<\/p>\n

Identifying<\/a> itself as a \u201cnonprofit<\/a> civil rights organization\u201d committed to \u201cfighting hate and bigotry\u201d while \u201cseeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,\u201d SPLC describes the United States as a country \u201cseething<\/a> with racial violence\u201d and \u201cintolerance against those who are different.\u201d \u201cHate<\/a> in America is a dreadful, daily constant,\u201d says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, and Arabs\/Muslims \u201care not \u2018isolated incidents,\u2019\u201d but rather, commonplace. To combat this ugly state of affairs, SPLC dedicates itself to \u201ctracking<\/a>\u00a0and exposing the activities of \u201chate groups and other domestic extremists\u201d throughout the United States.\u00a0Specifically, the Center’s \u201cHate & Extremism<\/a>\u201d initiative publishes its findings in SPLC\u2019s Hatewatch Blog<\/a>\u00a0and in its quarterly journal, the Intelligence Report<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

SPLC first gained widespread national recognition in 1987, when it won a $7 million verdict<\/a>\u00a0in a high-profile civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America (UKA). By the time that lawsuit was filed, UKA was already a destitute, impotent, disintegrating entity that virtually all white Americans emphatically rejected; the SPLC lawsuit merely drove the final nail into the UKA coffin. SPLC boasts that it has likewise won \u201ccrushing jury verdicts\u201d that effectively\u00a0shut down<\/a>\u00a0groups like the White Aryan Resistance, the White Patriot Party militia, and the Aryan Nations.<\/p>\n

This has been SPLC’s modus operandi since its inception: to initiate lawsuits against prominent hate groups for crimes that their individual members commit. In these suits, declares<\/a> Morris Dees proudly: \u201cWe absolutely take no prisoners. When we get into a legal fight we go all the way.\u201d The leftist writer\u00a0Ken Silverstein<\/a>, who in 2000 wrote a penetrating expos\u00e9 of SPLC for Harper’s<\/em>\u00a0magazine, has noted<\/a> that the targets of these lawsuits tend to be \u201cmediagenic villains\u201d who are \u201ceager to show off their swastikas\u00a0for the news cameras.\u201d As Dees and SPLC well understand, such figures stand the best chance of triggering an emotional public response that translates, in turn, into financial contributions from donors eager to combat the perceived threat.<\/p>\n

SPLC claims that there are currently 892<\/a> active \u201chate groups\u201d in the U.S.\u00a0Asserting\u00a0that the vast majority of such organizations are \u201cright wing,\u201d the Center says they include \u201cthe\u00a0Ku Klux Klan<\/a>,\u201d \u201cthe\u00a0neo-Nazi<\/a>\u00a0movement,\u201d\u00a0\u201cneo-Confederates<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0\u201cracist skinheads<\/a>,\u201d \u201cantigovernment militias<\/a>,\u201d \u201cChristian Identity<\/a>\u00a0adherents,\u201d and a variety of \u201canti-immigrant<\/a>,\u201d \u201canti-LGBT<\/a>,\u201d \u201canti-Muslim<\/a>,\u201d and \u201calternative Right<\/a>\u201d organizations. While also identifying a tiny smattering of\u00a0black separatist entities as hate groups, SPLC takes pains to\u00a0point out<\/a> that black organizations must be judged by a different standard than their white counterparts, because \u201cmuch black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

SPLC contends that from 2000 to 2012, the number of hate groups in the U.S.\u00a0increased<\/a>\u00a0by 67%\u2014a surge allegedly \u201cfueled\u00a0by anger and fear over the nation\u2019s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation\u2019s first African-American president\u201d (Barack Obama<\/a>). And America’s racists, by SPLC’s calculus, are almost all conservatives\u2014as evidenced by the caption featured in the \u201cHatewatch<\/a>\u201d section of SPLC\u2019s website: \u201cHatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.\u201d The radical left gets no mention at all.<\/p>\n

SPLC’s \u201chate group\u201d counts have been shown to be devoid of legitimacy a number of times.\u00a0Laird Wilcox<\/a>\u2014a researcher specializing in the study of political fringe movements\u2014reports that many SPLC-designated \u201chate groups\u201d are untraceable, due either to their inactivity or nonexistence. After\u00a0analyzing\u00a0the SPLC Klanwatch Project’s list of 346 \u201cwhite supremacist groups\u201d in 1992, for instance, Wilcox concluded that in fact there were only \u201cabout 50\u201d such groups \u201cthat are objectively significant, are actually functioning and have more than a handful of real numbers\u2014not post office box \u2018groups\u2019 or two-man local chapters.\u201d[1] In 2005, Wilcox reported<\/a>: \u201cSeveral years ago with minimal effort I went through a list of 800-plus ‘hate groups’ published by the SPLC and determined that over half of them were either non-existent, existed in name only, or were inactive.\u201d<\/p>\n

JoAnn Wypijewski, who writes for the far-left\u00a0Nation<\/em>\u00a0magazine, once said<\/a>: \u201cNo one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of [hate] groups than [SPLC’s] millionaire huckster, Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging [i.e., fundraising] letter [by stating that] \u2018the danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.\u2019\u201d To put Dees’s claim in perspective, the Ku Klux Klan at that time\u00a0consisted<\/a>\u00a0of no more than 3,000 people nationwide\u2014a far cry from the 4 million members it had boasted in the 1920s. Nonetheless, noted<\/a> Wypijewski, \u201cDees would have his donors believe\u201d that cadres of \u201cmilitia nuts\u201d are \u201clurking around every corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, the late left-wing journalist\u00a0Alexander Cockburn<\/a>\u00a0in 2009 called Dees the \u201carch-salesman of hate-mongering<\/a>,\u201d a man who profited by \u201cselling the notion there\u2019s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/em>\u00a0tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.\u201d \u201cEver since 1971,\u201d added Cockburn, \u201cU.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with [Dees’s] fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of how dramatically SPLC overstates their numbers, white racists like neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and skinheads indisputably deserve to be categorized as \u201chate groups.\u201d But the Center irresponsibly extends<\/a>\u00a0that designation also to numerous conservative and libertarian organizations that harbor no ill will against any demographic group, but merely hold political positions contrary to those of SPLC. As syndicated columnist Don Feder<\/a> writes: \u201cWhat makes [SPLC] particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and\u00a0jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there\u2019s a logical relationship between, say, opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, one noteworthy organization that SPLC has placed in its cross hairs is the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which the Center, in a 2003 report authored by researcher\/writer\u00a0Chip Berlet<\/a>, identified<\/a>\u00a0as part of \u201can array of right-wing foundations and think tanks [that] support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.\u201d Especially objectionable to SPLC was AEI fellow Dinesh D\u2019Souza, an Indian-born scholar (and former Reagan Administration adviser) \u201cwhose views,\u201d according to Berlet, \u201care seen by many as bigoted or even racist.\u201d Specifically, D’Souza has written that\u00a0affirmative action<\/a>\u00a0is an unjust, counterproductive policy; that \u201cmany liberals have been\u00a0peculiarly blind<\/a>\u00a0about black racism\u201d; that \u201cvirtually all contemporary liberal assumptions about the origin of racism … and what to do about it are wrong\u201d; and that \u201cthe civil-rights industry … now has a vested interest in the persistence of the ghetto, because the miseries of poor blacks are the best advertisement for continuing programs of racial preference and set-asides.\u201d \u201cD’Souza has suggested,\u201d wrote Berlet incredulously<\/a>, \u201cthat civil rights activists actually help perpetuate racial tensions and division in the United States.\u201d\u00a0Such sentiments as D\u2019Souza\u2019s are\u2014notwithstanding the repeatedly divisive rhetoric and actions of racial arsonists like\u00a0Al Sharpton<\/a>,\u00a0Jesse Jackson<\/a>,\u00a0Louis Farrakhan<\/a>, and the late\u00a0Julian Bond<\/a>\u2014anathema to an organization whose income stream is largely dependent upon an ability to perpetuate public angst over black suffering.<\/p>\n

Berlet’s 2003 report likewise\u00a0denounced<\/a>\u00a0another AEI-sponsored scholar, Charles Murray\u2014a Bradley Foundation research fellow who in 1994 co-authored\u00a0The Bell Curve<\/em>, which SPLC\u00a0described as \u201ca book that argues that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites and that most social welfare and affirmative action programs are doomed to failure as a result.\u201d Addressing unfounded critiques such as this, Hoover Institution scholar\u00a0Thomas Sowell<\/a>\u00a0wrote that widespread \u201cdemonization\u201d by \u201cdemagogues\u201d who were interested only in hearing \u201cwhat they want to hear,\u201d had rendered\u00a0The Bell Curve<\/em>\u00a0\u201cone of the most misrepresented books of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In SPLC’s 2003 report as well, Berlet\u00a0charged<\/a>\u00a0that conservative author David Horowitz \u201chas blamed slavery on ‘black Africans … abetted by dark-skinned Arabs’\u2014a selective rewriting of history.\u201d To this, Horowitz\u00a0replied<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI never in my life blamed slavery on black Africans \u2026 abetted by dark-skinned Arabs.’ What idiot would not know that white Europeans conducted the Atlantic Slave Trade, which trafficked in 11 million black African chattel? The sentence Berlet mangles is not a historical statement about slavery but a polemical response to the proponents of reparations who are demanding that only whites pay blacks for an institution\u2014slavery\u2014that has been eradicated in the western world (but not Arab and black Africa) for more than 100 years. It is intended to remind people that the slaves transported to America were bought from African and Arab slavers\u2014not to blame Africans and Arabs for sole responsibility for slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berlet\u00a0also<\/a>\u00a0took issue with what he called Horowitz’s \u201cfalse\u201d claim that \u201cthere never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians\u2014Englishmen and Americans\u2014created one.\u201d \u201cCritics note,\u201d Berlet added, \u201cthat Horowitz is ignoring everything from the slave revolt led by Spartacus against the Romans and Moses’ rebellion against the Pharaoh to the role of American blacks in the abolition movement.\u201d And yet, Horowitz had already anticipated and discredited these very charges two years earlier, in his 2001 book\u00a0Uncivil Wars: The Controversy About Slavery<\/em>, wherein he\u00a0wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor thousands of years, until the end of the Eighteenth Century, slavery had been considered a normal institution of human societies. In all that time, no group had arisen to challenge its legitimacy. Of course, there were many slave revolts from the times of Moses and Spartacus, in which those who had been enslaved sought to gain their freedom. But that was not the point. The freedom they had sought was their own. They did not revolt against the institution of slavery as such. What had happened in the English-speaking countries at the dawn of the American Republican was entirely unique. Before then, no one had thought to form a movement dedicated to the belief that the institution of slavery was itself immoral. What was important in this historical fact was that it showed that white Europeans who were the target of the reparations indictment had played a pivotal role in the emancipation from slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berlet\u2019s gross misrepresentations of Horowitz\u2019s work can only be understood in the context of Berlet\u2019s own political and ideological track record. For instance, in the mid-1970s he volunteered<\/a> to work on\u00a0Counterspy\u00a0<\/em>magazine,\u00a0an anti-CIA periodical founded by\u00a0Philip Agee<\/a>, the onetime intelligence officer who subsequently turned against the agency and spent years exposing the identity of undercover American spies who were stationed overseas. During the Cold War, Berlet was\u00a0a supporter of Communist police states\u2014most notably Albania, one of the most backward and repressive. Indeed, in 1983 Berlet was a founding<\/a> member of the Chicago Area Friends of Albania, a Communist front group that supported<\/a> the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania and the repressive political rule of the\u00a0Marxist-Leninist dictator\u00a0Enver Hoxha. And for the past 35 years Berlet has been a paralegal member of the National Lawyers Guild<\/a>, which throughout the Cold War embraced pro-Soviet agendas while systematically opposing the foreign policies of the United States, and which continues to depict America as the principal wellspring of evil on earth.<\/p>\n

In 2010 SPLC denounced the Tea Party, which advocated reductions in government spending and taxes, as a movement<\/a> that was \u201cshot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another of SPLC’s bedrock beliefs is its conviction that the U.S., in addition to being inherently racist, is also a homophobic nation that countenances all manner of injustice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people\u2014who, according to the Center, are \u201cfar more likely<\/a>\u00a0to be victims of a violent hate crime than any other minority group in the United States.\u201d SPLC tars anyone objecting to transformative cultural changes involving homosexuals\u2014such as gay marriage\u2014as a \u201chate\u201d monger whose opinions have no more legitimacy than those of an Aryan militia. Thus did the Center once list<\/a>\u00a0the conservative Family Research Council as a\u00a0hate group<\/a>, chiefly because of its\u00a0opposition\u00a0to same-sex marriage and its view that homosexuality is an \u201cunnatural<\/a>\u201d condition \u201cassociated with negative physical and psychological health effects.\u201d It should be noted that FRC expresses no malice at all toward homosexuals, as demonstrated not only by its professed \u201csympathy\u201d for \u201cthose who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions,\u201d but also by its call for \u201cevery effort \u2026 to assist such persons to overcome those attractions.\u201d<\/p>\n

SPLC\u2019s list of hate<\/a> groups and extremist<\/a> groups also\u00a0includes<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Traditional Values Coalition<\/a>, a conservative organization that opposes homosexuality on religious grounds and rejects the Employment Non-Discrimination\u00a0Act<\/a>, a bill that would designate transgendered people (cross-dressers) as a \u201cprotected class\u201d whom employers would not be free to eliminate from job-applicant pools on that basis.<\/p>\n

SPLC sees \u201cIslamophobia\u201d\u2014hatred and fear based on religious faith\u2014as yet another major defect in the American character. The June 2012 edition of\u00a0Intelligence Report<\/em>, for instance, featured<\/a>\u00a0a hit-piece titled \u201c30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right,\u201d which claimed that \u201can anti-Muslim movement, almost entirely ginned up by political opportunists and hard-line Islamophobes, has grown enormously since taking off in 2010, when reported anti-Muslim hate crimes went up by 50%.\u201d<\/p>\n

That seemingly ominous statistic seems less foreboding, however, when one considers that according to FBI data, the number of \u201creported anti-Muslim hate crimes\u201d nationwide increased from\u00a0107<\/a>\u00a0in 2009 to 160<\/a> in 2010\u2014technically a 50% increase, but hardly what could be characterized as an epidemic in a nation of more than 300 million people. Further, SPLC’s report gives no indication that the anti-Muslim hate-crime count of 2010 was in fact consistent with the normal, slightly fluctuating incidence of such events in other years\u2014e.g.,\u00a0155<\/a>\u00a0in 2002,\u00a0149<\/a>\u00a0in 2003, and\u00a0156<\/a>\u00a0in 2004. Equally noteworthy is the fact that when the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes had dropped from\u00a0156<\/a>\u00a0in 2006 to\u00a0115<\/a>\u00a0in 2007\u2014and from\u00a0481<\/a>\u00a0in 2001 (the year of the 9\/11 attacks) to 155 in 2002\u2014the Center never thought to suggest that bigotry against Muslims was steeply declining.<\/p>\n

SPLC’s \u201c30 New Activists\u201d report dismisses, as purveyors of hate, a number of scholars, researchers, and journalists who have examined and discussed, in a thoughtful and responsible manner, the teachings, values, history, and objectives of militant Islamists. Among those smeared in the report are\u00a0World Net Daily<\/em>\u00a0publisher Joseph Farah, American Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney, blogger\/activist Pamela Geller, and Accuracy in Media director Cliff Kincaid. In an effort to marginalize these individuals, SPLC\u00a0lumps<\/a>\u00a0them together with Klansmen and neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n

In October 2016, SPLC published a report titled\u00a0Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists<\/em><\/a>, a blacklist<\/a> profiling 15\u00a0\u201cIslam-bashing activists\u201d whose \u201cpropaganda\u201d was allegedly responsible for \u201cfueling\u201d acts of public \u201chatred\u201d against \u201cAmerican Muslims,\u201d who purportedly \u201chave been under attack\u201d in the U.S. \u201cever since the\u00a0Al Qaeda<\/a>\u00a0massacre of Sept. 11, 2001.\u201d\u00a0The subjects of these profiles included:<\/p>\n

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