The
SPLC is Indifferent to Muslim Anti-Semitism
by John Rossomando
IPT News
June 5, 2018
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 Muslim anti-Semitism
receives scant mention from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an
organization that is supposed to be dedicated
to "fighting hate and extremism." Its website has 1,327
articles about non-Muslim anti-Semitic actions, statements or hate
crimes. Less than 10 articles out of thousands on its website mention Muslim anti-Semitism.
Instead, it allies with Islamist groups and leaders, including the Council
on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), while giving their anti-Semitism a
pass.
SPLC's credibility has been questioned. It took down its media guide this year after Quilliam
Foundation co-founder Maajid Nawaz pointed out that its media guide contained
fabrications
about him. That guide also attacked IPT Executive Director Steven Emerson.
While the report may be gone, SPLC Intelligence Project Director Heidi
Beirich has yet to correct a false accusation she made against
Nawaz, claiming he was placed on a list of anti-Muslim extremists in part
because he supported vast surveillance of Muslims.
Beirich has produced no evidence to support the claim, which Nawaz
insists is a lie.
"The SPLC says it fights hate. Yet it criticizes groups that call
out Jew-hating Islamists, and ignores groups packed with Jew-hating
Islamists," Center for Security Policy (CSP) Executive Vice President
Christopher Hull told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
Hull has a specific bone to pick with the SPLC, which criticized new National Security Council Chief of Staff
Fred Fleitz, who worked for CSP until last week.
SPLC accused Fleitz of pushing an "extreme anti-Muslim
agenda" for highlighting the penetration of the U.S. government by
Islamic extremists. Fleitz says critics are misrepresenting his record:
"Please dont [sic] associate me with the above criticism of mosques or
the idea that the US should deport Muslims or strip their
citizenship," he wrote Saturday. "I do not and have never supported
this."
SPLC rightly slams Klansmen like David Duke for complaining about a "Zionist occupation of
Washington," and other white supremacists for telling the Iranian
press that Hollywood is "controlled by Zionists." But SPLC stands
silent when CAIR officials spout similar hateful rhetoric.
Last month, CAIR Los Angeles Executive Director Hussam Ayloush compared American Jews who serve in the Israeli army
with ISIS terrorists.
"Do you know how many hundreds of Jewish American kids are
recruited to join the Israeli occupation army?" Ayloush said. "No one has ever established a CVE program
to see why normal American kids leave their homes to become part of an army
committing war crimes... They go to the American Muslim community, although
the number of Muslims who join ISIS and Al-Qaeda is ... tiny."
Ayloush made
a similar statement in 2015. Such anti-Semitic statements are frequent
among CAIR leaders.
 Zahra Billoo, who
heads CAIR's San Francisco Bay area chapter, echoed Ayloush's
comments about the IDF on Twitter and compared the IDF with ISIS in a May
25 tweet.
"Both ISIS and the IDF are violent, immoral gangs. They're
literally baby killers," Billoo wrote.
She expressed horror last month at "... running into
Zionists [sic] war mongers from @AIPAC in
the elevators and the anti-civil rights activists from @ADL_National
in Congressional offices," during the U.S. Council of Muslim
Organizations (USCMO) Capitol Hill lobby days. But Billoo has a long
history of promoting Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, someone the
SPLC does identify as an extremist and anti-Semite. She featured a video
produced by Farrakhan's group, the Nation of Islam, on her blog in 2010. A
year earlier, Billoo tweeted that she listened to Farrakhan while working
out at the gym. The SPLC has yet to call out politically prominent Muslims
who stand with Farrakhan or who trade in similar rhetoric. For example, the
SPLC defended Women's March co-chair Linda Sarsour last year
over her use of the word "jihad," describing her as "a
loathed figure" among "anti-Muslim groups and individuals."
It chose not to address her history of hate speech toward Israel and its
supporters. The article even quoted Sarsour's self-hype that she is
criticized solely because she is "an effective leader for progress, a
Palestinian American and Brooklyn-born Muslim woman."
Sarsour already was an avowed Farrakhan supporter when the SPLC article came
out last July. She also is a frequent
speaker at CAIR banquets and strongly supports the group.
CAIR, meanwhile, has a long history of anti-Semitic speech. Jews control U.S. foreign policy,
Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a 1998 interview with The Georgetown Voice.
Two years later, he argued that the "ethnic or religious or racial background"
of U.S. policymakers explained their then policy toward Iraq.
"The Jews [sic] plans [through films they produced in Hollywood] to
distort Islam's image ... have succeeded in their plans. This Jewish plan
had borne hostility towards Islam and deforming its image," Awad told
Lebanon's Al-Lewa'a newspaper in August 2000.
Anti-Semitism is a worldview that focuses on "Jews conspiring to
harm non-Jews, and that conspiracy explains a lot of what goes wrong with
the world," a 2013 SPLC article says, quoting American Jewish Committee expert
Ken Stern.
That certainly seems to be a problem at CAIR, which the SPLC treats as credible. SPLC quoted Awad on Twitter
in April condemning the president's travel ban.
But SPLC has been silent since several American imams gave sermons
last December calling on Muslims to kill Jews after President Trump
recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Sheikh Mohammad Qatanani of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, called for violence against Israel at a Times Square
rally in the wake of the U.S. decision on Jerusalem.
"Our message to the Palestinian Authority, you have to stop all
kinds of peace process, no peace process and negotiation with the
occupation in Palestine. Oslo has to be stopped and to be finished. We have
to start a new intifada," Qatanani said
before leading the crowd in chants of "Intifada! Intifada!"
A North Carolina imam also sanctioned killing Jews in December.
"The Prophet Muhammad gave us the glad tidings that...we will fight
those Jews until the rocks and the trees will speak: Oh Muslim, this is a
Jew behind me," Imam Abdullah Khadra said in his North Carolina mosque. "The
continuation of the well-known Hadith is that the rocks and the trees say:
'Come and kill him.'"
Mohamed Elbar, imam of Brooklyn's Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, condemned
imams who call for nonviolence against Israel in April. Muslims have
the right to use violence against Israel, he said, "so long as the
occupier or the aggressor [Israel] possesses more power than you
[Palestinians] possess."
"[It's amusing that] the SPLC attacks Fleitz for rightly calling
out Jew-haters in the Islamic community, yet ignores Islamic groups like
CAIR linked to Jew-hating Hamas. Whose side are they on, exactly?"
Hull asked.
The SPLC classifies any group as a hate group if it "has beliefs or
practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for
their immutable characteristics," Beirich told
Politico last year. By this standard, many Islamist leaders,
including CAIR officials, would qualify due to their unabashed
anti-Semitism. Failure to include them even when they meet the group's own
criteria could suggest that SPLC's bigotry classification system boils down
to politics.
Related Topics: John
Rossomando, Southern
Poverty Law Center, anti-Semitism,
Fred
Fleitz, Heidi
Beirich, Maajid
Nawaz, Christopher
Hull, Center
for Security Policy, Hussam
Ayloush, Zahra
Billoo, CAIR,
Louis
Farrakhan, Nihad
Awad, Linda
Sarsour, Mohammad
Qatanani, Abdullah
Khadra
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