By Matthew Vadum —— Bio and Archives June 29, 2016
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“[M]any who offered their ‘thoughts and prayers’ know exactly what they are doing. They are trading on political expediency. The demonization of gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans pays, politically.”But this “demonization” of the LGBT community that the Southern Poverty Law Center complains of is pure paranoid fantasy. Anyone who followed media coverage in the days following the June 12 incident knows that cable TV and other media were filled with wall-to-wall denunciations of the Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen by politicians who acknowledged the sexual orientation of the victims whether explicitly or implicitly. Even those not generally sympathetic to gay rights made it clear that murder, including the murder of people based on their sexual preference, was morally abhorrent. None of this is surprising to those of us who have been tracking the SPLC’s adventures in vilification and defamation over the years. The SPLC is waging a scorched-earth war against Donald Trump. The group routinely and baselessly associates Trump with neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other marginal political actors it calls “the racist right.” Pointing out that these fringe figures back Trump in the election is the most obvious kind of smear. The Left did the same thing to Ronald Reagan in 1984 when the Ku Klux Klan offered him its unwanted endorsement. Reagan waited a full two weeks to denounce the KKK and reject its endorsement.
“Asked about the SPLC’s characterization of him, Yerushalmi said that he ‘represents a lot of Muslims.’ “I represent Muslim Americans, running from jihad and seeking asylum. If you want to say I’m an anti-jihad lawyer, you’re 100% right,” he continued. “Am I anti-Sharia? Yes, I am. Am I anti-Muslim? Not if he doesn’t have a gun in his hand shooting at me.’ “Yerushalmi alleged that the suit against Urth Caffe was part of a wider “civilizational jihad” waged by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which aims, he said, “to weaken western civilization.”The SPLC never tires of trying to assassinate the character of David Horowitz. A May 24, 2014 profile calls him “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.” Without presenting a shred of useful evidence, the Center separately smears Horowitz as “a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black movements.” Horowitz rejects these characterizations. On Monday he told this writer:
"I’m called the godfather of the anti-Muslim movement, which puts a target on my back, whereas out of million words and scores of hours of speeches on the subject they couldn’t find one sentence to back up their claim."The Southern Poverty Law Center has been playing this dangerous game for a long time. It doesn’t care if it gets innocent Americans killed. It came close to getting people killed four years ago. SPLC reports inspired left-wing terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II to shoot up the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Family Research Council four years ago. The Center identified FRC as a "hate group" not because it actually hates anyone but because it opposes same-sex marriage. Even the reliably left-wing Dana Milbank rejected that designation for FRC in an Aug. 16, 2012 Washington Post column, calling that group "a mainstream conservative think tank." "I disagree with the Family Research Council's views on gays and lesbians," he wrote. "But it's absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church." Corkins apparently disagreed. Upon entering FRC's office he reportedly said "I don't like your politics" and shot a black Christian security guard who managed to subdue him and lived to forgive him. Later Corkins told investigators "Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups," the Washington Examiner reported at the time. "I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that." The gay rights-avenging shooter had planned to kill as many FRC staffers as possible and smear Chick-fil-A sandwiches -- his backpack contained 15 of them -- on their faces as a political statement. He chose that fast food chain whose management is unabashedly Christian because its president was revealed to be a supporter of traditional marriage. Corkins was convicted of terrorism in 2013 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. And when the next Floyd Corkins comes along and actually succeeds in killing someone targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, its staffers will direct blame elsewhere. Scapegoating is what they do best.
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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