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SPLC aiding in Armenian Genocide Whitewash

by snork ( 139 Comments › )
Filed under Academia, Turkey at December 21st, 2010 - 2:00 pm

This is another example of what a greedy immoral corporation the Southern Poverty Law Center has become. This story is a little complicated, but let me reduce it to the basics.

1. One professor Guenter Lewy, at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote some Armenian genocide apologetics.

2. The SPLC, in one of its typical knee-jerk reactions, accused Lewy of being on the payroll of the government of Turkey.

3. Lewy sued for defamation. SPLC, basically a law firm, got caught with its pants down, because they simply assumed that Lewy was on the Turkish government’s payroll without checking (sound familiar?).

4. SPLC settled out of court. As part of the settlement, they went a bridge too far, and not only disclaimed that Lewy was getting any Turkish money, but also implied that the Armenian genocide wasn’t a deliberate genocide, but an accident.

Here’s the SPLC retraction:

Retraction and Apology
In the summer 2008 issue of its Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, was part of a network of persons, financed by the Government of Turkey, who dispute that the tragic events of World War I constituted an Armenian genocide. We now realize that we misunderstood Professor Lewy’s scholarship, were wrong to assert that he was part of a network financed by the Turkish Government, and were wrong to assume that any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the Government of Turkey. We hereby retract the assertion that Professor Lewy was or is on the Government of Turkey’s payroll.

To our knowledge, Professor Lewy has never sought to deny or minimize the deaths of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey; nor has he sought to minimize the Ottoman regime’s grievous wartime miscalculations or indifference to human misery in a conflict earmarked by widespread civilian suffering on all sides. What he has argued in his book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, and elsewhere is that the present historical record does not substantiate a premeditated plan by the Ottoman regime to destroy because of ethnicity, religion, or nationality, as opposed to deport for political-military reasons, the Armenian population. In this view, he is joined by such distinguished scholars as Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. As additional troves of archival information come to light, Professor Lewy advocates greater study of this contentious subject.

We deeply regret our errors and offer our sincerest apologies to Professor Lewy.

Professor Lewy adds the following comment:

“The SPLC has made important contributions to the rule of law and the struggle against bigotry. Thus I took no pleasure in commencing legal action against it. But the stakes, both for my reputation as a scholar and for the free and unhindered discussion of controversial topics, were compelling. It must be possible to defend views that contradict conventional wisdom without being called the agent of a foreign government.”

I’m not the least bit surprised that SPLC made this deal with the devil. They’ve been making deals with him for decades. But there it is. I have no doubt that they’d deny the Nazi Holocaust if it would get their asses out of a jam.

And of course, the genocide denier Lewy returns the favor by tossing the SPLC’s salad. It doesn’t get much sicker than this.

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Posted in Academia, Turkey | 139 Comments »

Leftist Scam Organization SPLC and its Cayman Island Bank Account

by 1389AD ( 166 Comments › )
Filed under Hate Speech, Media, Progressives at November 27th, 2010 - 8:30 pm

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is nothing but a leftist scam organization (I know, that’s redundant) whose purpose is to enrich its founders. It smears a great many legitimate conservative organizations by listing them as “hate groups.” It then uses innuendo and false accusations, along with guilt-tripping, to draw attention to itself for the purpose of garnering contributions. Until very recently, the mainstream media has treated the SPLC as a legitimate organization, and to some extent, it still does.

Southern ‘Poverty’ Law Center Cayman Islands Bank Account

(h/t: Iron Fist)

The SPLC’s new 2009 IRS 990 filing shows they have a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Now, stop for a good long minute and ask yourself what the hell is a supposed poverty-fighting Alabama-based tax exempt organization doing with such an account. Then ponder this: how much money is in it.

Unfortunately, the IRS does not require SPLC or any tax exempt charity with an account in a foreign country to disclose additional details, such as the amount, and the SPLC’s current 990 filing merely notes the existence of an account in a foreign country. The center’s site reveals neither the existence of the off-shore account nor the total it contains.

Assets for the organization are listed at $190 million, a nice chunk of change in these economic hard times. When was the last time this group, with almost $190 million in assets, did a damn worthwhile thing about, um, poverty?

The latest 990 additionally shows founder and chief trial counsel Morris Dees had his salary raised to $350,000, and his CEO, Richard Cohen, is close behind at $345,000.

The tax filing also shows Dees traveled by air charter, and that his spouse, artist and businesswoman Susan Starr, accompanies her husband on the business trips.

[…] Former Harper’s Magazine writer Ken Silverstein wrote a piece about the group in 2000, subtitled “How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance,” that is still very pertinent and well-worth reading today:

[…] In the early 1960s, Morris Dees sat on the sidelines honing his direct-marketing skills and practicing law while the civil rights movement engulfed the South. “Morris and I … shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” recalls Dees’s business partner, a lawyer named Millard Fuller (not to be confused with Millard Farmer). “We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.” […]

For Dees, the P in SPLC has nothing to do with personal poverty. That P better stands for profit or profiteering for him, and foolish donors keep sending him checks, thinking they’re helping poverty-stricken blacks or whites in Alabama move into better housing.

Since we’re on the subject of abodes in the Yellowhammer State, let’s have a gander at where Dees lives courtesy of the May 2010 Montgomery Advertiser 60-photo feature just on his mansion, the opulent furnishings and layout, not to mention a fabulous outfit shown off by his wife:

The swimming pool, as seen from the pool house.
The swimming pool, as seen from the pool house.

An area in the main house for relaxing conversations.
An area in the main house for relaxing conversations.

The studio building for Dees' wife Susan Starr.
The studio building for Dees’ wife Susan Starr.

A lounging jacket designed and modeled by Starr.
A lounging jacket designed and modeled by Starr.

More here.

Will this get any attention?

Says Iron Fist:

Wow, this should be big…Something to keep in mind when the SPLC designates a new “Hate Group” of the week: where does all that money come from? Soros, anyone? How much does it cost to get your political opponent designated a hater? The SPLC shouldn’t have any crediblilty left, but they do with the theoretical independent votes. Like I said, this should be big news. But it won’t be.

In case anybody hasn’t seen this yet, it thoroughly refutes the mindset and world view of Morris Dees and of liberals in general:

Why Modern Liberals Are 100% Wrong About Everything

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Posted in Hate Speech, Media, Progressives | 166 Comments »

SPLC Publishes Slime List

by snork ( 111 Comments › )
Filed under Political Correctness at April 27th, 2010 - 3:00 pm

I knew that the Southern Poverty Law Center was Fuldkommen Gak, but this shocked me. It takes a certain unbridled gall to put out a slime list like this of people who they mockingly refer to as “patriots”.

Not content to focus on organizations, and not content to focus on people advocating violence, they put together this Stasi-like file on a lot of people, who if they were considered to be part of the “left”, would be considered by SPLC to be righteous community organizers.

First off, they don’t seem to have a definite mission statement, but they do have a number of links with trite names like “hate and extremism”. A click on the “hate map is instructive. I clicked my state of Washington, and got 15 “hate” organizations, 14 of which were neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and in one case they even had a group flagged as “Radical Traditional Catholicism”. Scary. Latin mass is a racist conspiracy. And they had one token Black Separatist group.

So I went down to Oregon as a double check. This time 10 groups. Again, a bunch of skinhead/Nazi/klan types, and one token Black Separatist group.

I did this, because they won’t define “hate and intolerance”, but they are clearly trying to create the appearance of it being predominantly a thing of the “right”, with the fig leaf of the token black separatist group thrown in to pretend that they don’t have an ideological ax to grind.

Which brings us to the “patriots”. According to them:

In the last year and a half, militias and the larger antigovernment “Patriot” movement have exploded, accompanied by the rapid expansion of other sectors of the radical right. This spectacular growth (see timeline) is the result of several factors, including anger over major political, demographic and economic changes in America, along with the popularization of radical ideas and conspiracy theories by ostensibly mainstream politicians and media commentators.

“In the last year and a half” is dogwhistle for “since Barack Obama was elected”. Jeez, guys, can you be any more transparent? So let me deconstruct that.

Since Barack Obama was elected, militias and the larger antigovernment “Patriot” movement have exploded, accompanied by the rapid expansion of other sectors of the radical right.

Ok? Is that a little more honest?

This spectacular growth (see timeline) is the result of several factors, including anger over major political, demographic and economic changes in America, along with the popularization of radical ideas and conspiracy theories by ostensibly mainstream politicians and media commentators.

The “timeline” is all reported by the SPLC, and doesn’t prove an increase in anything. There are no quantitative measures of anything. They freely intermix actual allegations of violence with people simply saying things that they don’t like.

Their claimed reasons are also pure conjecture. So with this hyperventilating in the background, they go on to slime a lot of people as interchangeable with hard-core kooks. The first character, Chuck Baldwin, seems a little out there, but I don’t see him advocating violence. Is it the mission of the SPLC to out people for exercising their right to free speech?

Their inclusion of the second featured individual, Joe Banister, I find more than a little disturbing. He is silent on issues of race, religion, and even culture and immigration. His “sin” in the eyes of the SPLC? He is a critic of the IRS. This is sick that the SPLC has the time and resources and energy to dog tax critics.

The third individual is more than a little out there. He’s an antisemitic asshole, who deserves no defense, but he still has the right to free speech.

The inclusion of the fourth individual is also a puzzle. What was Catherine Bleish guilty of? Criticizing Treasury Secretary Geithner for not paying taxes. That apparently makes one a dangerous bigot in the estimation of the SPLC.

On to the fifth guy – the man who the MSM tried to tell us was a white racist. Except whoops. He turned out to be black, but the MSM specifically cropped that inconvenient truth out.  By open carrying his gun in Arizona, he freaked the bejeebers out of every prog this side of Pluto. According to the SPLC,

Broughton made headlines in August 2009 when he showed up outside an Obama rally in Phoenix with an AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder and a pistol holstered on his waist, becoming a hero to many in the “Patrtiot” movement in the process. He said he carries his guns habitually.

Broughton, apparently assuming that the Obama Administration planned gun control measures, said he wanted to make a point about the right to own guns. “The overwhelming statement I was trying to make was whether you like it or not, my guns aren’t going away,” said the Phoenix machinist. “They’re going to be here until you kill me and take them away.”

Oh noes! A machinist!!! A black guy who carries guns and works at a (gasp) real job! No wonder he makes the SPLC wet their pants. White guys who carry guns and work for a living are scary enough, but…Fuldkommen Gak!!!

“Barack Obama is responsible for more death than my guns ever will be,” Broughton said. “He could end so much suffering immediately, and instead he uses his power to force his agenda. I do hate him.”

Hate!!!

Number six is someone who also is guilty of opposing BHO.

Bob Campbell and his American Grand Jury are on a mission to drive President Obama from office and put him on trial for treason. Obama “is a certified crook that has committed treason and fraud,” Campbell wrote on his website late last year. “He is a fraud and a traitor.”

This makes him a dangerous terrorist in the SPLC’s bong dream.

Number seven seems to be a nutball, but not dangerous:

The chilling footage, shot with night-vision equipment, was posted to YouTube, and Crooks E-mailed a link to several prominent nativist leaders. “This video shows how to keep a ‘Home Depot’ parking lot empty,” Crooks wrote. He chided other nativists who, he suggested, could “talk the talk” but not “walk the walk.”

At first, Crooks denied making the video. But when faced with an investigation, he acknowledged making it and said the shooting was nothing but a hoax. The reason he did it: “We’re old men and we’re bored.”

Squirrely. But then, apparently inadvertently, SPLC concedes that the Minutemen don’t welcome this kind of squirreliness:

Other Minuteman organizations cut ties with Crooks over the episode. But he remains in the public eye. Last year, he appeared on ABC’s “20/20” and was the subject of a Penthouse magazine profile.

So these guys are reading…ahem…research in Penthouse. Yeah.

Next is the only well-known member of the group, the nutty, but nonetheless harmless Joseph Farrah of WND fame. I won’t spend any more space on him, because he’s a known quantity, and while out there, not dangerous. It is noteworthy however that SPLC seems to imply that it’s dangerous to question the nativity of Obama:

He is a leading fomenter of the baseless claim that President Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Africa, and so is not qualified to be president. Farah has repeatedly demanded that Obama release a full-form birth certificate. “It’ll plague Obama throughout his presidency,” he said. “It’ll be a nagging issue and a sore on his administration.”

So SPLC seems to have a rather long totalitarian streak; insisting that questioning Obama’s nativity makes one a second-class citizen, unworthy of the equal protection of the law.

The list goes on over six pages, and 35 individuals, and while many on this cherry-picked list are crackpots and nutballs (and even more aren’t), they haven’t furnished any evidence that any are dangerous.

This is the Southern Poverty Law Center. Stirring up trouble, because it pays. You should have said “mission accomplished” and folded up shop when you shut the klan down, instead of trying to manufacture right-wing racists in order to try in vain for a second orgasm.

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Posted in Political Correctness | 111 Comments »