Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been under attack by Muslim groups for more than two decades. Her work in trying to free Muslim women from the tyranny, the beatings, the forced genital mutilation by Muslim men has resulted in death threats against her, too numerous to count.
A close friend and collaborator, Theo van Gogh, was butchered on an Amsterdam street in 2004 by a Muslim terrorist. Suffice it to say that "hate" — real, soul-destroying, all-consuming hate — is something that Hirsi Ali is quite familiar with.
Exposing the truth about Islamic societies, their oppression of women, and virulent antagonism directed against other religions became her life's work. Yet, despite the target on her back and the need for constant protection from attack, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) branded her an "anti-Muslim extremist."
"I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy; for writing about Islamist-driven antisemitism and the subversive actions of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the West; for drawing attention to practices such as honor killings and female genital mutilation; for arguing that Muslim women deserve the same protections under the law as other women," writes Hirsi Ali in The Free Press.
But those crimes by Islamists play a secondary role to the glorious mission of the SPLC. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and other violent white supremacists are only players in a massive fundraising game by the SPLC. If individuals like Hirsi Ali are exposed to blood-curdling threats and attempts on her life, that's just part of the game.
The SPLC placed Ali on a blacklist called “A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists,” along with 15 other "anti-Muslim extremists." It accused her of using “the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims.”
"Maajid Nawaz, a reformed radical who ran a counter-extremism organization, and an array of figures also dedicated to combating Islamism and antisemitism, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes," were also on the list, according to The Free Press. Nawaz sued the SPLC and won a handsome $3.4 million settlement. The list of "anti-Muslim extremists" quickly disappeared.
But that lawsuit began a collapse of SPLC's fundraising juggernaut. It was described in a 2000 investigation as the "wealthiest civil rights organization in America."
In 2000, the journalist Ken Silverstein published a long investigation in Harper’s Magazine describing the SPLC as the wealthiest civil rights organization in America, one whose fundraising had grown to dwarf its legal work. CharityWatch later gave the organization an F for stockpiling donations it did not spend on its stated mission. Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience. That should have ended it. Instead, the donors kept giving, and the lists kept growing.
The reason the SPLC kept getting richer is that the entire edifice of American media backed them and covered for them. The Harper story barely made a ripple, and SPLC's fundraising nearly doubled in 2017.
The donors deserve a closer look than they have ever received. Every moral panic became a fundraising opportunity, and the SPLC’s biggest benefactors arrived not in moments of sober reflection but in moments of maximum political heat. After the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally in August 2017, the organization’s revenue more than doubled—from roughly $50 million the prior fiscal year to $132 million by October 2017. Apple gave $1 million. JPMorgan Chase pledged another $500,000, along with an equivalent gift to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). George and Amal Clooney, through their Clooney Foundation for Justice, gave $1 million and urged others to follow. Three years later, after the death of George Floyd, another donation cycle opened, this time with even more corporate enthusiasm. OpenAI, Google, and a long roster of Fortune 100 companies added the SPLC to their giving portfolios. We now know, if the indictment is proved, where some of that money went: to the leaders and organizers of the very Klan and neo-Nazi groups the SPLC’s fundraising materials say it exists to fight.
The SPLC had morphed from a relatively small, dedicated group of activists who sincerely wanted to alert the media and the American people to the dangers of extremism into a fundraising machine that used these same groups to create "moral panics," which loosened the purse strings of the rich and corporations, thus enriching the leaders of the SPLC.
Meanwhile, actual "hate" incidents were declining, the Klan was on the run, and neo-Nazis had been shunted to the sidelines; the work of the SPLC had largely been accomplished.
But the group's leadership had become addicted to the money and attention the media showered on them. So, the SPLC went looking for other targets.
"The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets," writes Hirsi Ali.
The SPLC has now become the first advocacy group to be indicted for subverting the cause of fighting extremism. They are not likely to be the last.
"What makes this case special is that, for the first time, we have evidence—bank records, fake company names, field-source receipts—to show that the inversion was operational," writes Hrisi Ali. "And if it was operational inside the SPLC, there is no reason to assume the deception stopped at the SPLC’s doors."
Indeed. It turns out that the Charlottesville rally in 2017, where a young woman died, was partly planned by an SPLC operative.
"When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting 'Jews will not replace us,' they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment," writes Hirsi Ali.
All of this will be glossed over or not even mentioned by the SPLC defenders. Nor will the false labeling of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali as "haters." Lives were destroyed, people were prevented from getting jobs, and reputations were ruined, all in the pursuit of raising money.
It's morally reprehensible.
Hirsi Ali will never be free of the smears perpetrated by the SPLC. They will follow her to her death, as will the threats from Islamic terrorists that the SPLC aided in their fundraising efforts.
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