From Jihad Watch:
Court Dwarfs in the Poverty Palace
Given the recent designation of Stop Islamization of America as America's latest, hippest hate group, you might think that a hateful SOB like me would choose SIOA as his favorite. I mean, on one level SIOA really does seem to have it all:
•Bands of angry New Yorkers, milling around the site where thousands of their fellow citizens were murdered by religious fanatics, insisting irrationally that the followers of that religion not build a victory monument at the crime scene.
•Bus ads rolling through various American cities, offering help and advice to those who wish to escape the religion of the terrorists—instead of accepting the proper sentence of death prescribed for apostates.
•Campaigns to commemorate young girls murdered and butchered by their male relatives for refusing to adhere to 8th century sexual mores.
Clearly, this group is at the forefront of racial and ethnic hatred in America. You don't get much edgier or more poisonous than this. Those of us who take a grim delight in fomenting inter-group animus, and urging people on to wipe each other out, would have a hard time finding any other organization in such perfect accord with our goals. If only there were somewhere (per impossibile) a world religion that (hold on, I'm going to let my imagination run free for a few moments here):
•Imagined that it had the right to impose its dictates on the entire human race.
•Had a holy book prescribing death or apartheid-style subjugation for anyone who resisted.
•Declared that every religion that came before it was either an evil cult, or a bastardized version of its own beliefs, bowdlerized to hide the evidence that it would come along later.
•Motivated thousands of young men every year to commit suicide murder on its behalf.
•Taught its followers to waltz into foreign countries demanding equal, or even special rights.
•At the same time, brutalized and humiliated any religious dissenters unlucky enough to reside within the countries it had conquered.
•Shamelessly practiced intolerance where it was dominated, while milking its enemies' guilt for absolute tolerance where it was weak.
•Dismissed human reason as a blasphemous construct, and offered instead the rationalizations it had constructed atop a long-winded, self-serving private revelation—which must henceforth serve as the source of all jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy.
Now that would be a hate group I could sign up for. Compared to that, SIOA is like some high-decibel chapter of Hadassah, whose mah-jong game at the senior center had gotten a little rowdy.
Still, I will take what I can get. Since there is no world religion matching such a description, I must concur with the SPLC (Snickering Posers who Like cashing Checks) that SIOA (Stop the Infiltration Of Amish) is clearly a band of irrational trouble makers.
If I didn't accept this theory, I might be forced to adopt a rather cynical reading of SPLC's motives. A group that began as Klan Watch, back when the Klan still (barely) existed, SPLC has since had to reinvent itself as an all-purpose watchdog keeping a keen eye on the activities of groups such as... Civil War Reenactors, Catholic monks, and opponents of Islamic terror. Given the happy decline into obscurity of white racist and anti-Semitic groups (anti-Zionists don't count, no matter how many Jews they kill), SPLC has been forced to look a little harder for its targets. Since the only people outside of psych wards and tiny little compounds in Idaho who still preach the mass repression or murder of others based on religion are Muslims, and are by definition innocent, the standards for what makes a hate group will have to broadened a bit.
The alternative is too ugly to contemplate: SPLC might have to declare “victory” and go home, and its officers might have to sacrifice the six-figure incomes they earn by churning out letters that scare elderly Holocaust survivors into writing them fat checks. That money might instead be wasted on legacies to their grandchildren, when it could go to good use gold-plating the toilet fixtures on SPLC's glittering Poverty Palace. Men like Morris Dees would have to find jobs at Starbucks.
Without the SPLC to tell us where to locate intolerance and bigotry, we might find ourselves confused. We might look at foundations which funnel money into foreign terrorist organizations devoted to murdering Jews and Christians, and mistake these charities for hate groups. We might, when we read about blasphemy laws that target religious minorities, or social mores that goad fathers into murdering their daughters, somehow conclude that the creed which underlies such activities is in itself hateful. And that might lead us to assert our country's native values—driving us thereby down the ugly road of nativism.
Such self-assertion and confidence in our own nation's civic creed would lead us to view with skepticism those who consider our values blasphemous. We might worry over how many such people to admit into our country, and begin to monitor their behavior in their native lands. We might foolishly conclude that the way people act when they have the upper hand is somehow predictive of how they will act if we let them gain the upper hand over us. And that would make us hatemongers. It would goad us into the kind of ugly narrowness that marked Americans who called themselves “anti-Communists.” We might, when we read totalitarian political manifestos aimed at us, fail to understand that such statements were merely the “blowback” we'd earned by our own aggressiveness and imperialism. We might stop picking the scabs of our national guilt, and start holding other people to standards akin to those we apply to our detestable ancestors.
And who knows where that might lead?
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 25, 2011 9:40 PM
And this, related, also from Jihad Watch:
Hard-Left SPLC defames SIOA as "hate group"
Just another Leftist propaganda tactic -- go to the Daily News and vote in their poll here.
Here is our statement, via Yahoo News:
Human Rights Organization SIOA Vows to Fight Far-Left Propaganda Group’s “Hate Group” Designation
NEW YORK, February 25, 2011 – A prominent national human rights and advocacy organization has vowed to fight against its designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-Left propaganda group, as a “hate group.”
The day after yet another deadly Islamic jihad terror plot involving weapons of mass destruction was thwarted in Texas, the SPLC issued its latest list of hate groups, including Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).
SIOA Executive Director Pamela Geller declared in a statement: "It's outrageous that the SPLC designates a group dedicated to protecting the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and legal equality for all Americans as a ‘hate group.’ The SPLC, instead of standing for those freedoms, is carrying water for the real haters, the real neo-Nazi Jew-haters: the forces of Islamic supremacism and jihad. The SPLC doesn’t even have a category for Islamic jihadi groups. The greatest threat facing our nation, our people, our world, and they are shilling for them.”
SIOA Associate Director Robert Spencer pointed out that the Islamic supremacist hate group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the Justice Department designated an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case and has had several of its officials convicted of jihad terror activity, is not listed by the SPLC as a hate group. “That the SPLC would list SIOA and not CAIR as a hate group shows the hollowness and political motivation of the SPLC’s classifications,” Spencer said.
The Washington Times reported in November 2010 that “the SPLC is a small, hard-left political activist outfit known for promoting a panoply of radical liberal causes. The Center holds itself out as an objective monitor of potentially violent or subversive hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and other white supremacists. But in recent years - and with increasing abandon - the SPLC has leveraged (abused, really) its rapidly decreasing political capital and waning credibility to target and undermine organizations that, rather than dealing in the business of genuine ‘hate,’ instead pose a direct threat to the advancement of postmodern secular-socialism generally - and to the Democratic Party specifically….In sum, the SPLC has become an extremist wolf in ‘watchdog’ clothing.”
"My group is a human rights group," Geller said. "And these people are taken seriously? This is the morally inverted state of the world."
Geller added: “The SPLC is getting well-paid to defame freedom fighters. According to the SPLC's 990 Form for 2008, the SPLC's Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees made a generous $348,420 that year. SPLC President and CEO Richard Cohen was right behind him at $344,490. General Counsel Joseph Levin made $189,166. Legal director Rhonda Brownstein brought in $179,806; CFO Teenie Hutchinson, $155,414. Potok pulled in $143,099. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Blancett made $159,301 -- that's right, the former COO. Who is funding this anti-America, anti-Jewish group of subversives?”
“We are going to fight this libelous designation,” Geller said, “and continue our struggle to protect human rights for all people. The SPLC has made itself the servant of the most radically intolerant ideology on earth. They’re on the wrong side of history.”
SIOA is one of America's foremost organizations defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the United States.
Pamela Geller has more here.
Posted by Robert on February 25, 2011 3:25 PM
Court Dwarfs in the Poverty Palace
Given the recent designation of Stop Islamization of America as America's latest, hippest hate group, you might think that a hateful SOB like me would choose SIOA as his favorite. I mean, on one level SIOA really does seem to have it all:
•Bands of angry New Yorkers, milling around the site where thousands of their fellow citizens were murdered by religious fanatics, insisting irrationally that the followers of that religion not build a victory monument at the crime scene.
•Bus ads rolling through various American cities, offering help and advice to those who wish to escape the religion of the terrorists—instead of accepting the proper sentence of death prescribed for apostates.
•Campaigns to commemorate young girls murdered and butchered by their male relatives for refusing to adhere to 8th century sexual mores.
Clearly, this group is at the forefront of racial and ethnic hatred in America. You don't get much edgier or more poisonous than this. Those of us who take a grim delight in fomenting inter-group animus, and urging people on to wipe each other out, would have a hard time finding any other organization in such perfect accord with our goals. If only there were somewhere (per impossibile) a world religion that (hold on, I'm going to let my imagination run free for a few moments here):
•Imagined that it had the right to impose its dictates on the entire human race.
•Had a holy book prescribing death or apartheid-style subjugation for anyone who resisted.
•Declared that every religion that came before it was either an evil cult, or a bastardized version of its own beliefs, bowdlerized to hide the evidence that it would come along later.
•Motivated thousands of young men every year to commit suicide murder on its behalf.
•Taught its followers to waltz into foreign countries demanding equal, or even special rights.
•At the same time, brutalized and humiliated any religious dissenters unlucky enough to reside within the countries it had conquered.
•Shamelessly practiced intolerance where it was dominated, while milking its enemies' guilt for absolute tolerance where it was weak.
•Dismissed human reason as a blasphemous construct, and offered instead the rationalizations it had constructed atop a long-winded, self-serving private revelation—which must henceforth serve as the source of all jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy.
Now that would be a hate group I could sign up for. Compared to that, SIOA is like some high-decibel chapter of Hadassah, whose mah-jong game at the senior center had gotten a little rowdy.
Still, I will take what I can get. Since there is no world religion matching such a description, I must concur with the SPLC (Snickering Posers who Like cashing Checks) that SIOA (Stop the Infiltration Of Amish) is clearly a band of irrational trouble makers.
If I didn't accept this theory, I might be forced to adopt a rather cynical reading of SPLC's motives. A group that began as Klan Watch, back when the Klan still (barely) existed, SPLC has since had to reinvent itself as an all-purpose watchdog keeping a keen eye on the activities of groups such as... Civil War Reenactors, Catholic monks, and opponents of Islamic terror. Given the happy decline into obscurity of white racist and anti-Semitic groups (anti-Zionists don't count, no matter how many Jews they kill), SPLC has been forced to look a little harder for its targets. Since the only people outside of psych wards and tiny little compounds in Idaho who still preach the mass repression or murder of others based on religion are Muslims, and are by definition innocent, the standards for what makes a hate group will have to broadened a bit.
The alternative is too ugly to contemplate: SPLC might have to declare “victory” and go home, and its officers might have to sacrifice the six-figure incomes they earn by churning out letters that scare elderly Holocaust survivors into writing them fat checks. That money might instead be wasted on legacies to their grandchildren, when it could go to good use gold-plating the toilet fixtures on SPLC's glittering Poverty Palace. Men like Morris Dees would have to find jobs at Starbucks.
Without the SPLC to tell us where to locate intolerance and bigotry, we might find ourselves confused. We might look at foundations which funnel money into foreign terrorist organizations devoted to murdering Jews and Christians, and mistake these charities for hate groups. We might, when we read about blasphemy laws that target religious minorities, or social mores that goad fathers into murdering their daughters, somehow conclude that the creed which underlies such activities is in itself hateful. And that might lead us to assert our country's native values—driving us thereby down the ugly road of nativism.
Such self-assertion and confidence in our own nation's civic creed would lead us to view with skepticism those who consider our values blasphemous. We might worry over how many such people to admit into our country, and begin to monitor their behavior in their native lands. We might foolishly conclude that the way people act when they have the upper hand is somehow predictive of how they will act if we let them gain the upper hand over us. And that would make us hatemongers. It would goad us into the kind of ugly narrowness that marked Americans who called themselves “anti-Communists.” We might, when we read totalitarian political manifestos aimed at us, fail to understand that such statements were merely the “blowback” we'd earned by our own aggressiveness and imperialism. We might stop picking the scabs of our national guilt, and start holding other people to standards akin to those we apply to our detestable ancestors.
And who knows where that might lead?
Posted by Roland Shirk on February 25, 2011 9:40 PM
And this, related, also from Jihad Watch:
Hard-Left SPLC defames SIOA as "hate group"
Just another Leftist propaganda tactic -- go to the Daily News and vote in their poll here.
Here is our statement, via Yahoo News:
Human Rights Organization SIOA Vows to Fight Far-Left Propaganda Group’s “Hate Group” Designation
NEW YORK, February 25, 2011 – A prominent national human rights and advocacy organization has vowed to fight against its designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-Left propaganda group, as a “hate group.”
The day after yet another deadly Islamic jihad terror plot involving weapons of mass destruction was thwarted in Texas, the SPLC issued its latest list of hate groups, including Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).
SIOA Executive Director Pamela Geller declared in a statement: "It's outrageous that the SPLC designates a group dedicated to protecting the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and legal equality for all Americans as a ‘hate group.’ The SPLC, instead of standing for those freedoms, is carrying water for the real haters, the real neo-Nazi Jew-haters: the forces of Islamic supremacism and jihad. The SPLC doesn’t even have a category for Islamic jihadi groups. The greatest threat facing our nation, our people, our world, and they are shilling for them.”
SIOA Associate Director Robert Spencer pointed out that the Islamic supremacist hate group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the Justice Department designated an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case and has had several of its officials convicted of jihad terror activity, is not listed by the SPLC as a hate group. “That the SPLC would list SIOA and not CAIR as a hate group shows the hollowness and political motivation of the SPLC’s classifications,” Spencer said.
The Washington Times reported in November 2010 that “the SPLC is a small, hard-left political activist outfit known for promoting a panoply of radical liberal causes. The Center holds itself out as an objective monitor of potentially violent or subversive hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and other white supremacists. But in recent years - and with increasing abandon - the SPLC has leveraged (abused, really) its rapidly decreasing political capital and waning credibility to target and undermine organizations that, rather than dealing in the business of genuine ‘hate,’ instead pose a direct threat to the advancement of postmodern secular-socialism generally - and to the Democratic Party specifically….In sum, the SPLC has become an extremist wolf in ‘watchdog’ clothing.”
"My group is a human rights group," Geller said. "And these people are taken seriously? This is the morally inverted state of the world."
Geller added: “The SPLC is getting well-paid to defame freedom fighters. According to the SPLC's 990 Form for 2008, the SPLC's Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees made a generous $348,420 that year. SPLC President and CEO Richard Cohen was right behind him at $344,490. General Counsel Joseph Levin made $189,166. Legal director Rhonda Brownstein brought in $179,806; CFO Teenie Hutchinson, $155,414. Potok pulled in $143,099. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Blancett made $159,301 -- that's right, the former COO. Who is funding this anti-America, anti-Jewish group of subversives?”
“We are going to fight this libelous designation,” Geller said, “and continue our struggle to protect human rights for all people. The SPLC has made itself the servant of the most radically intolerant ideology on earth. They’re on the wrong side of history.”
SIOA is one of America's foremost organizations defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the United States.
Pamela Geller has more here.
Posted by Robert on February 25, 2011 3:25 PM
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