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Thursday, 16 August 2012
SPLC, CAP Join MPAC in Anti-Semitic Hate Rhetoric
 David Yerushalmi, Architect of Lori Lowenthal Marcus of Z Street has published in today's Jewish Press a brilliant recap of last night's MPAC teleconference with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Soros-backed Center for American Progress (CAP): "Southern Poverty Law Center Joining Pro-Hamas, Hezbollah Groups in Blasting "Haters" - Mostly Jews" . The teleconfrence marked a new low in agitprop by Muslim Brotherhood front group MPAC and its 'progressive' allies. As Marcus notes in her article, the focus was on criticizing largely Jewish counter-Jihadists painting them as racists denying First Amendment guaranteees of 'protected speech'. That the SPLC which relies heavily on liberal American Jewish contributors, would undertake this dramatic shift toward the support of the 'dark side' of Islamic Jew hatred is troubling. The SPLC has surely lost its moral compass. Marcus noted that in her opening stanza: A quick peek at . . .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. Prominent among these American Jewish counter-jihadist criticized was David Yerushalmi, the architect of the model American Law for American Courts model legislation introduced in more than two dozen states and enacted in four: Arizona, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kansas. In many ways, last night's MPAC teleconference call exposed the devolution of the Southern Poverty Law Center from its former civil rights activism into equating Jewish and other counter-Jihadists as equivalent to the KKK. Prominent among the verbal dossier presented by Aajahat Ali of the CAP came straight out their publication, Fear, Inc. that we correctly tagged last summer in an NER article: Fear, Inc. The Obama Re-election Straetgy for Muslim Votes. Much of what Ali discussed on the call was simply a repetition of the Fear, Inc. report. We noted: Note what one of the study co-authors, Wahajat Ali says is the agenda of this ‘conspiratorial’ network: Ali simply resurrected this trope of flagrant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory libel on last night's MPAC-sponsored call. When Ali cites $40 million in support of counterjihad activities from several foundations, that pales by comparison with what the combinedf SPLC, CAP take was in 2011, well over $66 million. Note this comment from Steve Emerson, one of those accused of hate rhetoric by Ali on the MPAC teleconference call: 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.” Rabbi Jon Hausman and Dr. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance were quoted by Marcus zeroing in on the SPLC's bizarre policy shift towards alliance with patently ant-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric: Rabbi Jon Hausman of Stoughton, Massachusetts signed the letter. Hausman said he could not understand how the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was “founded to combat the worst impulses of hatred is now working with acknowledged purveyors of anti-Semitism, and which believes the State of Israel needs to be dismantled.” Jim Cavanaugh, a former ATF official involved with the Columbia, Tennessee mosque burning of 2008 posted this comment on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama, Hatewatch.in reference to a controversial counter-terrorism training program sponsored in February 2012 by the Rutherford County Sheriff's office :
Cavanaugh's statement is ironic given what SPLC perpetrated with its Intelligence Director, Heidi Beirich's comments and participation in last night's MPAC teleconference on "The Real World Impact of Hate Rhetoric in America." SPLC has drunk "from the poison cup of hate." Anti-Semitic hate. Posted on 08/16/2012 9:02 AM by Jerry Gordon
Comments
16 Aug 2012
jerry kammer BELOW IS AN EXCERPT OF A REPORT I WROTE ABOUT THE SPLC FOR THE CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES, WHERE I AM WORKING AFTER A LONG CAREER IN NEWSPAPER REPORTING. IT BEGINS WITH A REFERENCE TO AN INVESTIGATIVE SERIES BY THE SPLC'S HOMETOWN NEWSPAPER THAT EXPOSED THE HUCKSTERISM OF MORRIS DEES The deceptions that the Montgomery Advertiser described have been a consistent part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s strategy to build its reserve fund. It received $32,395,733 in contributions in 2008, an average of $88,755 per day. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year, during which its investments lost more than $48 million, the fund had $174,200,000.92 While Dees was raised a Southern Baptist, he suggested to some donors that he had a more diverse background. For example, in a 1985 fundraising pitch for funds to protect SPLC staff from threats of Klan violence, Dees made conspicuous use of his middle name — Seligman, which he received in honor of a family friend. A former SPLC attorney told The Progressive magazine that Dees signed letters with his middle name in mailings to zip codes that had many Jewish residents.93 The article was titled “How Morris Dees Got Rich Fighting the Klan.” A former SPLC employee told the Montgomery Advertiser that the donor base was “anchored by wealthy Jewish contributors on the East and West coasts.”94 Attorney Tom Turnipseed, a former Dees associate, told Cox News Service, “Morris loves to raise money. Some of his gimmicks are just so transparent, but they’re good.”995 Turnipseed described a fundraising letter whose return envelope carried “about six different stamps.” The purpose of the ruse was to present the appearance of an organization struggling to keep going. As Turnipseed noted: “It was like they had to cobble them all together to come up with 35 cents.” Writing in Harper’s magazine in 2000, investigative reporter Ken Silverstein reported that the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America.” He also noted that Dees had broken a series of promises to end fundraising and live off its endowment once it had reached a threshold level.96 Wrote Silverstein: “Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America … . The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the SPLC one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors.” Silverstein noted that Dees’ salary was tens of thousands of dollars more than the salary paid to directors of organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It amounted to a quarter of the annual budget of Atlanta’s Southern Center for Human Rights, whose annual caseload included dozens of death-penalty cases. Dees may believe his tactics are harmless embellishments, minor manipulations justified by his altruistic mission to challenge hate and “teach tolerance” through a program that sends educational materials to schools across the country. He might apply the same rationalization to a deception cited by USA Today in 1996 as an example of his exaggeration of the threat of hate groups. The paper reported that “in a recent report on arsons at black churches in the South, his Klanwatch newsletter included five 1990 fires in Kentucky. But Klanwatch omitted a significant fact: the fires were set by a black man.”97 Taking Account of Morris Dees A few journalists, mostly writing in liberal publications, have described a long history of hustling, hypocrisy, and hucksterism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of [hate] groups than the millionaire huckster, Morris Dees,” wrote JoAnn Wypijewski of The Nation magazine in 2001.98 Ripping the SPLC as “puffed up crusaders,” Wypijewski wrote: “Hate sells; poor people don’t, which is why readers who go to the SPLC’s website will find only a handful of cases on such non-lucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety, or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and 1980s. Why the organization continues to keep ‘Poverty’ (or even ‘Law’) in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt.” In 2009, liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn called Dees the “arch-salesman of hate-mongering.” Under a headline that labeled Dees the “King of the Hate Business,” he said Dees thrived by “selling the notion there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other … . Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America.”99 Jesuit humanities professor Raymond A. Schroth, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, described Dees’ manipulation this way: “He focuses on a real problem and packages it to suit his purposes. If the problem is nuanced, complicated … he provides a prism, based partly on fear, through which we can view the issue: The Internet is out of control; hate groups are poisoning the World Wide Web. His Southern Poverty Law Center, with your help, will save you.”100 |