Southern Poverty Law Center Pays $3,375,000 Settlement

You would have to be a bit crazy to take on the immensely rich Southern Poverty Law Center. It has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it stashed overseas, and has a huge staff of attorneys, but Maajid Nawaz did and he won. The SPLC is paying a $3.375-million settlement

Mr. Nawaz is a liberal Muslim based in London with much experience with and knowledge of extremist militant Islamists. The SPLC smeared him as an "anti-Muslim extremist." The case shows the unreliability of SPLC's “Hate Watch™” style information.

The SPLC is, itself, an extremist Left group which has gotten rich sending out sensationalistic fear-mongering solicitations and maintaining the “Hate Watch™” website. The defamation of Mr. Nawaz is typical of the SPLC's sloppy research. Dozens of other police, INS agents, Christian groups, conservatives, Republicans, and revisionists are regularly splattered with filth spewed out by the SPLC. Many are now uniting to fight the SPLC reign of defamation.

The SPLC can only thrive because its backers in the media give the organization credibility and excuse its inaccurate propaganda. The New York Times, CNN, Facebook, Amazon, and Google all repeat SPLC's inaccuracies. Reportedly Apple's Tim Cook even gave the organization $2,000,000.

The reckless defamation spewed by the SPLC has been connected to several cases of violence. Floyd Lee Corkins III attacked the Washington office of the Family Research Council intending to kill as many people as he could. He admitted under questioning that he picked the FRC because it was on the SPLC's "Hate list."

James Hodgkinson, the mass shooter who attacked the Republican baseball team in 2017 was a Friend of the SPLC on Facebook. In 2014, the SPLC cited a report that oneof Hodgkinson's victims, Congressman (R-La.) Steve Scalise gave a speech in 2002 to a group called European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), an outspoken white-nationalist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The same article cited a 1999 Roll Call interview in which Scalise appeared to compare himself to Duke. Defenders of the SPLC lamely claim that "we have no way of knowing whether Hodgkinson even read the SPLC’s report on Scalise."   That the claims were defamatory and hurtful is ignored by SPLC partisans.

In today's political climate, the defamations of the SPLC destroy people in the same manner that charges of being "Communist" could ruin lives in the 1950's.   Fortunately, Mr. Nawaz stood up for himself and showed the dishonesty of the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The New York Times, CNN, Facebook, Amazon, and Google should all be wary of repeating the SPLC's defamations.