Southern Poverty Law Center Faces Dozens of Lawsuits from Organizations It Falsely Labeled as Hate Groups

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been viewed by the left as a reputable source for knowing who is, and who isn’t a neo-Nazi. The best part, at least for the left, is that the SPLC is very loose with the term.

If the left doesn’t like anyone, they can officially peg them as a hate group with the help of the SPLC. The left gives the SPLC this honor because…it can. There’s no real basis for the SPLC being the end-all-be-all when it comes to officially labeling someone a hate group, it just says what the left likes to hear, and thus is an important part of societal recognition of evil people.

But now, the SPLC may be paying for their casual use of comparing people to Nazis.

Recently, the SPLC $3.3 million settlement with Quilliam Foundation founder Maajid Nawaz, a group the SPLC had thrown into the Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. Nawaz is simply an Islamic reformist, and former extremist. Oddly, his position against Islam’s current form earned him the title of extremist himself by the SPLC.

How a Muslim wanting to turn Islam away from female genital mutilation, oppression of women, horrific punishments for even violating the most picayune law, and brutal death sentences is an anti-Muslim extremism, the SPLC doesn’t say. Nawaz is an anti-Muslim extremist, and that’s that.

But Nawaz didn’t take it lying down, and he went after the SPLC. Before anything even got to court, the SPLC buckled, apologized, and awarded Nawaz his millions.

And that opened the floodgate. According to PJ Media, over 60 groups that the SPLC has attacked in the past are considering going after the leftist group for libel in the same way Nawaz did:

No fewer than 60 organizations branded “hate groups” or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action.

“We haven’t filed anything against the SPLC, but I think a number of organizations have been considering filing lawsuits against the SPLC, because they have been doing to a lot of organizations exactly what they did to Maajid Nawaz,” Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told PJ Media on Tuesday.

Even if just a handful of these groups go after the SPLC, it’ll teach the organization that throwing around hateful labels is worth more consideration than just seeing that it opposes the current leftist cause célèbre. It’s done so with abandon to very innocent people.

This includes such people as Christina Hoff Sommers who, according to the SPLC, is an anti-feminist voice who gives “the men’s rights movement a veneer of even-handedness.” Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the SPLC takes the side of feminism, and argues that Sommers is akin to a men’s rights activist.

Anyone can look to see that a good majority of the men’s rights movement isn’t at all evil, and have a lot of valid points to make, but add to the fact that Sommers is a very factually driven, kind, and honest woman and you see gaps in the SPLC’s logic. Regardless, the SPLC has thrown her and any men’s rights activist into the column of gender KKK.

To make matters worse, the SPLC has thrown Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an anti-Sharia activist who speaks out against the violence of women by Islamic extremism, into the category of anti-Muslim extremist alongside Nawaz.

Ali responds to the SPLC’s foul move of labeling her as such in the NYT:

Yet the S.P.L.C. has the audacity to label me an “extremist,” including my name in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” that it published on its website last October.

In that guide, the S.P.L.C. claims that I am a “propagandist far outside the political mainstream” and warns journalists to avoid my “damaging misinformation.” These groundless smears are deeply offensive, as I have dedicated much of my adult life to calling out the true extremists: organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet you will look in vain for the S.P.L.C.’s “Field Guide to Muslim Extremists.” No such list exists.

The point of throwing the “hate group” label around is, as former SPLC spox told a crowd one day, to completely destroy the groups it labels.

“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them,” Potok said.

Rest assured, the SPLC is far more intolerant of others opinions than many of the groups they arbitrarily label as intolerant and hateful. If any organization needs to be destroyed, it’s the SPLC.