The New Anti-Racist Racists

By Douglas Murray

• There is a trait campaigning groups have that is well known. Once they have achieved their objective, they continue. Usually it is because there are people with salaries at stake, pensions, perks and more.
• Suddenly the SPLC seemed to spy a new fascism. The SPLC saw this new fascism in people who objected to people flying planes into skyscrapers, decapitating journalists and aid workers and blowing up the finish line of marathons.
• One got the impression that it had become immensely useful for some people to be able to smear those concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, and try to make them akin to Nazis. The only other movements who find this equally useful are, of course, Islamic extremists.
• Here is this "anti-racist" organisation, largely made up of white men who present themselves as being anti-racists, and yet who spend their time attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a black immigrant woman. At the top of any list of "hate-groups," the SPLC must in future be sure to place itself.
• The SPLC's list of "anti-Muslim activists" also includes a practising Muslim, Maajid Nawaz, one of the most principled and courageous people around calling out the extremists in his faith for their bigotry and hatred. He does so, like Hirsi Ali, at no small risk to himself.

The Southern Poverty Law Center decided to turn itself into a racist organization, with its attacks on principled and courageous critics of radical Islamism such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (left), a prominent ex-Muslim writer, and Maajid Nawaz (right), a moderate practising Muslim writer, radio host and politician. (Images source: Wikimedia Commons)

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), based in Montgomery, Alabama, has struck again. The self-appointed boundary-markers and policemen of free discussion have issued what they call a "Field Guide" to help "guide" the media in "countering prominent anti-Muslim extremists." It is hard to know where to start with such idiocy, so let us start from the beginning.

The SPLC was founded in 1971, ostensibly to fight for civil rights among other good causes. By the end of its first decade it was targeting the KKK and other racist organisations. So far so good. But like many a campaigning organisation, they experienced the happy blow of basically winning their argument. By the 1990s, there were mercifully few racist groups in America going about unchallenged. When a member of the KKK cropped up everybody in civil society pretty much understood that here was a bad person who should not be given a free pass.

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