A Hateful Allegation of Hatefulness

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A Hateful Allegation of Hatefulness Posted: 26 Feb 2016 03:47 PM PST Citizen Warrior was designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). But since we shared the designation with the likes of Political Islam, the Tennessee Freedom Coalition and the Center for Security Policy, we feel pretty good about it. Fred Fleitz, senior vice president for policy and programs with the Center for Security Policy, wrote an article with some interesting facts about the SPLC. Here are some excerpts from his article: This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) named my organization, the Center for Security Policy, a “hate group” because of our work highlighting the threat from radical Islam. The SPLC is best known for its work decades ago fighting legal battles against segregation in the South. But it long ago morphed into a far left group with one purpose: manufacturing material to slander conservatives for use by the news media and on the Internet. The SPLC is not a civil rights organization — it is a far left advocacy group that tries to discredit its political enemies on the right with incoherent hate lists that wrongly associate them with notorious bigots to advance a liberal agenda. This is consistent with #12 of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” SPLC also demonized conservatives with bogus hate charges because it has found this kind of fearmongering to be very lucrative. According to the SPLC’s 2014 tax return, this non-profit organization had $54 million in revenue and $315 million in assets. Back in 2000, an investigative report into the SPLC’s activities was published by Harper’s Magazine titled The church of Morris Dees: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance. It described the SPLC and its activities as “essentially a fraud” that “shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.” Perhaps the main reason the SPLC has been able to raise such huge sums because its president, Morris Dees, is so skilled at using scare mongering mailings for fund raising that in 1998 he was inducted into the Direct Mailing Association Hall of Fame. Based on its 2010 tax return, the liberal website Daily Kos criticized the SPLC in 2012 for its enormous wealth, offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands, and ownership in several foreign corporations. The author of this article asked, “What I’m very curious to learn is how keeping hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in assets, several offshore bank accounts and part ownership in foreign financial firms in any substantive way addresses poverty in America.” I believe the SPLC’s new focus on Islamophobia is because the organization has identified attacking critics of radical Islam as the ultimate money pot. For example, Saleh Abdulla Kamel, a Saudi banker believed to have been a financer of Usama bin Laden, gave $10 million to Yale University in 2015 to build an Islamic law center. Given the SPLC’s lack of scruples, greed and offshore operations, I believe it is very likely that this group is receiving funding from Gulf state billionaires like Kamel to discredit anyone who criticizes radical Islam and the global jihad movement. The news media must stop being manipulated by the SPLC’s calumny of its political enemies. Reporters should realize that an organization which attacks all critics of radical Islam as Islamophobes, refuses to mention the extremism and intolerance of radical Islamist groups, and is silent on the growing anti-Semitism on the left and violence against Jewish university students cannot be considered a neutral and authoritative source. Read the whole article here: What do Ben Carson, Frank Gaffney share? Both are victims of a left-wing smear machine.