OFIR note: The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is in big trouble for maligning anti-extremist British Muslim Maajid Nawaz. It appears the the SPLC has overstepped not only the bounds of sensibility, but bounds of legality.
It should be noted that the SPLC has listed Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR) on their arbitrary "hate map". As a result, the University of Oregon used this accusation as grounds to try to intimidate OFIR on use of OFIR's logo.
This is a prime example of how the radical left uses bullying tactics against legitimate mainstream organizations.
From the article:
The U.S. far-left “anti-hate” Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has agreed to pay anti-extremist British Muslim Maajid Nawaz a 3.3m dollar settlement after the group included him in a list of anti-Muslim extremists.
The settlement amount was announced by Mr Nawaz on Twitter Monday following a lawsuit brought against the group last year for including him on their “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”
Nawaz included a press release from the anti-extremist Quilliam group which he co-founded that said not only was the SPLC paying Nawaz and Quilliam $3.375 million U.S. dollars but also formally apologized to Nawaz for including him on their “hate list.”...
Related
Pressured, the Southern Poverty Law Center Admits It Was Wrong, by Douglas Murray, National Review, June 19, 2018:
Any free society must expect that a certain number of chancers, hucksters, and shake-down artists will prosper among them. But rarely have they come in so grossly endowed and shameless a guise as the “Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The SPLC was founded in the 1970s, and back then it did some respectable campaigning work to target and shut down — through legal means — actually racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. All well and good, and the SPLC can still be applauded for this work. And yet students of non-profits and charities worldwide will be familiar with a certain tendency in this field, which is that such organizations rarely shut themselves down. Or, to put it another way, a charity set up to cure a disease may find a cure for that disease and yet strangely also find some reasons to continue. For of course salaries and pensions are at stake. ...
So it is — though in far worse form — with the KKK and the SPLC. Of course as the KKK dwindled to an all but negligible fringe, the SPLC could not afford to bask in its victories. There was still cash to collect. Indeed more cash than ever. And who but a fool, or an honest man, would leave tens of millions of dollars on the table? So it is that in recent years the SPLC reoriented itself. It became an organization that looked into all those things that were not racist but that might be deemed right of center. It decided to look into not terrorism and racism but “extremism.” It decided, in particular, that it should become the self-appointed arbiter of what is acceptable in American life and what is unacceptable....
Yet the SPLC has repeatedly shown itself to be woefully unfit to perform its self-assigned task. For instance in 2015 it “designated” (as though this should have had any standing anywhere other than in the minds of the SPLC’s employees) Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson as an “extremist.” So within the space of only a few decades the SPLC moved from targeting the KKK to targeting a black conservative. ...
Which brings us to today. For as of today it seems possible that the SPLC’s position may finally be taken back down to the position it should have been reduced to years ago. Perhaps after today those donors who still give money to the SPLC will realize that they are backing a disgraced and disgraceful organization, if any were unaware of and unbothered about this before....
Also see: The SPLC File - An Exclusive Report on the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Social Contract, Spring 2018.
Read more about U.S. Far-Left Group SPLC To Pay Counter-Extremist Maajid Nawaz $3.3M Settlement Over Anti-Muslim 'Hate List'
