Southern Poverty Law Center: Discredited, Smearfest Hate Group

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a discredited smearfest hate group.

For years, they have listed all kinds of conservative, pro-family groups has hateful, extremist, bigoted.

Their reasons were unfounded, unsubstantiated, and unfair.

But why have they gotten away with it all this time?

A growing counter-media had not emerged to call out their hatred. Independent reporters did not have the large marketshare of readers and writers to counter-act these lies.

Also, men and women smeared by the lies and attacks of the SPLC did nothing about the hateful attacks.

Until now:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been hit with a big payout after losing in a defamation lawsuit to Quilliam International and Maajid Nawaz, the founder of the organization. Nawaz objected to being mentioned in SPLC’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” and sued for defamation. SPLC has now agreed to pay out a $3.375 million settlement and admitted it was wrong to add Nawaz and his organization to the since-removed list.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong to include Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation in our Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Since we published the Field Guide, we have taken the time to do more research and have consulted with human rights advocates we respect,” the page where the “Field Guide” seemingly used to be reads. “We’ve found that Mr. Nawaz  and Quilliam have made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism. Although we may have our differences with some of the positions that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have taken, they are most certainly not anti-Muslim extremists. We would like to extend our sincerest apologies to Mr. Nawaz, Quilliam, and our readers for the error, and we wish Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam all the best.”

As the agreement shows, this apology was part of the deal.

The New York Post wrote a gloating takedown of the SPLC:

The headline says it all:

Southern Poverty Law Center finally pays for its smears

Gratifying!

There's more:

For once, the Southern Poverty Law Center has to cough up for an outrageous smear.

The SPLC rakes in donations by claiming to fight hate, but its lists of hate groups routinely include not just truly vile outfits but also ones that simply don’t toe a politically correct line.

Exactly. The New York Post isn't exactly a conservative newspaper, but they couldn't help celebrate this major downfall for the SPLC.

It went too far in listing Maajid Nawaz and Quilliam, a think tank he founded, in its 2016 “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” which proclaimed in part: “Extremists routinely espouse a wide range of utter falsehoods, all designed to make Muslims appear as bloodthirsty terrorists or people intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms.”

Think about this: the SPLC listed a Muslim as an "anti-Muslim extremist." That's not just hateful, it's not just stupid. It proves how obtuse and libelous the SPLC has become.

Now uber-leftist anti-Trump "comic" Bill Maher wants to help Maajid Nawaz:

Talk show host Bill Maher said Friday he would like to join a crowd-funded lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center. The host of the HBO show "Real Time" said the civil rights group "were being assholes" by including British activist Maajid Nawaz on its list of "anti-Muslim extremists."

Nawaz, a former Islamist and founder of a think tank called the Quilliam Foundation, said on Maher's show that he was "sick and tired" of such criticism from "well-meaning liberals" and would mount a crowd-funded defamation suit against the SPLC.

"I'd like to be part of the crowd," Maher said.

So would I, frankly.

We the People Rising and MassResistance, two groups which I have worked with, should receive a settlement from the SPLC Smear Machine, too.

There's more good news. This hate group had to take down one of its extremism lists, too!

The Southern Poverty Law Center has removed the “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” from their website after attorneys for Maajid Nawaz, a practicing Muslim and prominent Islamic reformer, threatened legal action over his inclusion on the list.

The report, which had been active on the SPLC’s website since it was published in December 2016, was intended to serve as a resource for journalists to identify promoters of hateful propaganda; but it included a number of liberal reformers such as Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who has since dedicated his life to combating the hateful ideology.

Even the Washington Post has published an editorial exposing the Center's complete collapse in credibility:

The SPLC is a once-storied organization that did important work filing civil rights lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. But it has become a caricature of itself, labeling virtually anyone who does not fall in line with its left-wing ideology an “extremist” or “hate group.”

"Caricature" is a nice word, but it doesn't capture the sinister, destructive results waged by this hateful propaganda machine in the Deep South.

It gets better:

So how did he end up in the SPLC’s pseudo-guide to anti-Muslim bigots? His crime, apparently, is that he has become a leading critic of the radical Islamist ideology he once embraced. Thanks to his courage, the SPLC has been forced to pay a multimillion-dollar penalty and acknowledge in a statement that it was “wrong” and that Nawaz has “made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.”

It just proves that SPLC promotes hate instead of fighting hate. They are also conning their donors, since they promote their abusive bigotry.

And it has consequences.

Even Newsweek reported on this epic fail for SPLC:

Nawaz, 40, announced the suit against SPLC in June of last year, and the organization admitted in its apology that it altered its position after several “human rights advocates affiliated with the United Nations” praised Nawaz’s work.

Also, a leader of the SPLC, Heidi Beirich, was quoted during a speech as saying that Nawaz wanted mosques surveilled and that in turn meant “his opinion is that all Muslims are potential terrorists.”

No surprise that SPLC wanted to cover their tracks and hide behind the United Nations.

Let's see how long those excuses last.

Final Reflection

I took the time to post different articles and comments about the Southern Poverty Law Center precisely to expose how discredited they have become.

They just lost a defamation lawsuit. Granted, it was a settlement, but the the Center had to issue an apology. This lawsuit will be the first of many, no doubt, as more groups of goodwill with different political views will start filing lawsuit of their own to shut down the abuses of this terrible group.

Finally, conservatives, free speech advocates, and pro-family forces are fighting back and winning.

From this point forward, any newspaper which references the SPLC should automatically be discarded or be forced to issue a retraction for citing such a heinous, hateful, and false source of information.

P.S.

The FBI no longer relies on SPLC for information about hate groups. I wonder why ...