Human Rights Organization SIOA Vows to Fight Far-Left Propaganda Group's 'Hate Group' Designation - Yahoo! News

Human Rights Organization SIOA Vows to Fight Far-Left Propaganda Group's 'Hate Group' Designation - Yahoo! News


– Fri Feb 25, 7:30 pm ET
NEW YORK, Feb. 25, 2011 –
NEW YORK, Feb. 25, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- 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.
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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.