JUST WHAT ORGANIZATION IS DANGEROUS TO AMERICA?

Submitted by: Donald Hank

Southern Poverty Law Center Joining Pro-Hamas, Hezbollah, Groups in Blasting ‘Haters’ – Mostly Jews

By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Published: August 16th, 2012

David Yerushalmi, staunch opponent of Sharia law, is on the SPLC, MPAC and CAP list of "haters."

The Southern Poverty Law Center was once an icon for Jewish values of racial tolerance and equality.  It played a key role in the American civil rights movement.

The Center’s views have now been stretched so far that, in the name of tolerance and equality, the SPLC is partnering with, on the one hand, a Muslim group whose followers revere and support Hamas and Hezbollah, and a far-left think tank whose writers were spewing accusations of dual loyalty and other anti-Semitic canards just a few months ago.

On Wednesday evening, August 15,  SPLC joined with the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Center for American Progress to present a teleconference call they publicized as addressing “The Real World Impact of Hate Rhetoric in America.” It was clear, however, from the participants and the language in the announcement that the hate-meter is all and only about measuring alleged anti-Muslim rhetoric, and will not take a baby step near anything so mundane as anti-Semitism.

Wajahat Ali, “an attorney and expert on the $40 million dollar Islamophobia industry in the US,” is a co-author of  “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,”   Ali represented CAP on the conference call.  He explained that the Network is comprised of a small group of funders who support the experts who create the information, which is then transmitted to grass roots organizations, fed to the mainstream media, and then is inserted into the talking points of leading conservative politicians.

A quick peek at Fear, Inc.’s five supreme evil villains reveals four of the five are Jews, and the fifth works closely with Jews and Jewish organizations.  Those five are Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy; David Yerushalmi (Orthodox Jew) at the Society of Americans for National Existence; Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum; Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America; and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

During the teleconference Wajahat included David Horowitz (yes, another Jew) of the Horowitz Freedom Center in his list of the Network experts.  Horowitz was not surprised that the SPLC was joining with MPAC and CAP to criticize people like him.

“The SPLC is the most prominent and active leftwing smear site in America,” Horowitz told The Jewish Press.   He explained that, “like much of the left it has joined the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in attacking patriotic Americans who oppose the Islamist oppression of women, gays and other religions and promote jihad against the United States.”

The Center for American Progress has been embroiled in a hate speech controversy of its own, one that was not discussed during the Hate Rhetoric teleconference.

Last spring CAP was hit with repeated charges of anti-Semitism over the use by some of its leadership of such terms as “Israel-Firsters” to describe politicians and others who allegedly put Israel’s interests above those of the United States. Several of the organization’s members left as a result of the controversy.

The third group anchoring the teleconference on “Hate Rhetoric” is one whose leader – and the one co-anchoring the call -  blamed Israel for the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2011.  It is a group allegedly born from the seed of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Public Affairs Council president Salam al-Marayati is an expert on hate rhetoric, having long engaged in directing his own version towards Jews and the Jewish State.  But he is tone deaf to certain kinds of hate speech – minimizing and even lauding the terrorist acts of Hezbollah which he claims constitute legitimate resistance.

So why is a nice group like the Southern Poverty Law Center joining forces to talk about Hate Rhetoric with two extreme purveyers of, well, Hate Rhetoric?

Steve Emerson is one of the “architects” of the Islamophobic Network, according to CAP.  Emerson told The Jewish Press, “that now the SPLC has scurrilously jumped on the ‘Islamophobia industry’ like MPAC and CAP in promoting a totally fabricated conspiracy that alleges a group of ten individuals (yours truly included) colluded for a decade to hypnotize 300 million Americans to be suspicious of Muslims.”

In fact, according to Emerson, “the reality is MPAC, SPLC, CAP and also the ADL and ACLU are the true conspiratorialists in promoting the myth of Islamophobia, a term created by radical Islamic groups, together with their handlers like CAP, the SPLC  and the ADL, to silence any criticism of radical Islam.”

A group of national religious leaders joined together in a letter they made public, called on the SPLC leadership to withdraw from the teleconference: “To treat MPAC as a legitimate organization, much less a valued partner of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is an extraordinary rejection of Jewish Americans and of moderate Muslim Americans. “