XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities, alt.politics.democrats.d, sac.general   
   XPost: alt.rush-limbaugh   
   From: jane.fonda.socialist.report@cnn.com   
      
   The Southern Poverty Law Center has less to do with justice than   
   with fundraising   
      
   It had to happen sometime. The Southern Poverty Law Center has   
   made so many vile, unjustified, hysterical, and hateful   
   accusations over the years, it was bound to pay a price. When it   
   did, the bill due was $3.375 million. Such was the amount the   
   SPLC agreed to pay the British Muslim Maajid Nawaz and his think   
   tank, the Quilliam Foundation, after smearing them in a “Field   
   Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” Nawaz, a former Islamist   
   radical turned whistleblower who calls for the modernization of   
   Islam in columns for the Daily Beast and on London talk radio,   
   had threatened to sue the SPLC for defamation — traditionally   
   and properly a difficult case to make in U.S. courts. Yet the   
   SPLC caved spectacularly.   
      
   The amusing but uncharacteristically groveling tone of the   
   SPLC’s apology suggests fear of Nawaz’s lawyers: “We have taken   
   the time to do more research,” stated the SPLC (doing research —   
   what a novel idea!), noting that Nawaz has made “valuable and   
   important contributions to public discourse,” adding that he is   
   “most certainly not” an anti-Muslim extremist, and concluding,   
   “We would like to extend our sincerest apologies to Mr. Nawaz,   
   Quilliam, and our readers for the error.” The settlement further   
   stipulated that the SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, would film   
   a video apology, prominently display it on the outfit’s website,   
   and distribute the apology to every email address and mailing   
   address on the SPLC mailing list. Whether Cohen was further   
   required to come over to Nawaz’s house every week and iron his   
   laundry could not be learned.   
      
   The Nawaz settlement was the most damaging episode yet in what   
   has become an increasingly dire situation for the SPLC’s   
   floundering image. Image, painstakingly built since its founding   
   in 1971, is its chief asset. Image is what keeps the dollars   
   flowing in. The Right has long been calling attention to the   
   SPLC’s questionable tactics, but these days even Politico, The   
   Atlantic, and PBS are running skeptical pieces about the saints   
   of the South. Politico wondered whether the SPLC was   
   “overstepping its bounds” and quoted an anti-terrorism expert,   
   J. M. Berger, who pointed out that “the problem partly stems   
   from the fact that the [SPLC] wears two hats, as both an   
   activist group and a source of information.” David A. Graham of   
   The Atlantic wrote that the “Field Guide” was “more like an   
   attempt to police the discourse on Islam than a true inventory   
   of anti-Muslim extremists, of whom there is no shortage, and   
   opened SPLC up to charges that it had strayed from its civil-   
   rights mission.” PBS interviewer Bob Garfield suggested to its   
   president that the SPLC is increasingly seen “not as fighting   
   the good fight but as being opportunists exploiting our   
   political miseries” and that this was tantamount to killing “the   
   goose that lays the golden egg.” In 2015 the FBI dropped the   
   SPLC from its list of resources about hate groups.   
      
   Lately the SPLC has taken on an increasingly desperate, self-   
   parodying tone, denouncing such mainstream figures as the   
   psychologist, author, and PJ Media columnist Helen Smith and the   
   American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers,   
   calling them “anti-feminist female voices” and adding them to   
   its double-secret-probation list under the catch-all term “male   
   supremacy.” Former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who is   
   black, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the group had   
   “smeared” her after she questioned the SPLC’s “misguided focus.”   
   Mark Potok, then the SPLC’s national spokesman, de­nounced her   
   as “an apologist for white supremacists” in a story published on   
   the front page of Swain’s local news­paper, the Tennessean.   
      
   To sum up recent events: The SPLC has been crazily denouncing   
   highly respected writers who are Muslim, black, and female for   
   being anti-Muslim, anti-black, and misogynist. All of these   
   contrived charges are in the service of the SPLC’s core mission,   
   which is to separate progressives from their dollars.   
      
   Founded in 1971, the Alabama-based SPLC, dubbed “essentially a   
   fraud” by Ken Silverstein in a blog post for Harper’s back in   
   2010, discovered some time ago that it could line its coffers by   
   positioning itself as a scourge of racists. Silverstein reported   
   that in 1987, after the SPLC sued the United Klans of America,   
   which had almost no assets to begin with, over the lynching   
   murder of Michael Donald, the son of Beulah Mae Donald, the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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