Friday, February 13, 2009



The SPLC is at it again

Despite being a loony Left outfit, they are always quoted most respectfully by the media. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration studies comments:
"The most recent salvo on this side of the ocean is a report released last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center tarring the three leading groups working to limit immigration-including my own Center for Immigration Studies-as part of a racist conspiracy, supposedly orchestrated by a retired eye doctor in Michigan named John Tanton. The fact that they went after mainstream groups rather than fringe ones shows that the goal is not elevating the tone of public discourse but shutting it down altogether. Perhaps a more honest title for the report would have been "The Protocols of the Elders of Restrictionism."

A little background on the SPLC. The group is headed by Morris Dees, described even by left-wing writers as a "fraud" and a "millionaire huckster"-essentially a cross between Joseph McCarthy and Tammy Faye Bakker. Exposes on the group have run in the Montgomery Advertiser (which probably would have won a Pulitzer but for the SPLC's lobbying efforts against it), Harper's, and The Nation, but the money train continues-the SPLC's 2007 tax return shows net assets of $219 million.

The report's section on CIS is not just hackwork, but amateurish hackwork. Much of it dwells on letters written to (not by, but to) one of my board members, misidentified as having been executive director. Our research is described as having been debunked by "mainstream think tanks and organizations," oddly enough including two of the most strident open-borders advocacy groups in the nation. My tenure there, the majority of the center's existence, is dismissed briefly at the end as "The Later Years." And they didn't even mention my book, which knits together decades of CIS research on the many facets of immigration into a unified theoretical framework-something at least worth touching on when trying to show how naughty CIS is.

What's more, CIS is an unlikely source of "intolerance." The chairman is Peter Nunez, U.S. attorney for San Diego under Reagan; the board includes the president of the Greater Miami Urban League and a former executive director of the National Black Caucus Foundation; the staff includes the former national policy director for the American Jewish Committee; and I didn't even speak English until I got to kindergarten.

I don't know much about the details in the other sections (on FAIR and Numbers USA) but I can only assume they're up to the SPLC's usual standards.

Now, people call each other names all the time in politics, but this is different. The SPLC purports to play the role of arbiter of rectitude on racial issues, and as such it claims to take no other policy positions. This pose is utterly false; the report was jointly released with America's Voice, a hard-left open-borders group. And regardless of who's making it, the charge of racism is the gravest one in our society-not a political one, like an allegation that you failed to pay taxes on your chauffeured limousine, but a moral one, meant to delegitimize you altogether as a participant in civilized society.

Source

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the main reasons the Republicans have been swept from power, and (IMO) the main reason John McCain lost his bid for the White House, (thank God) are one in the same. It is their inability/refusal to truly understand how the far-left plays "the game". The far-left plays pure hard ball. They do not play by (or care about) the so-called rules, as McCain insisted on doing. They don't care about taking the high road, also as McCain insisted on doing.

As this story clearly shows, one of the left's oldest and most effective tactics is to put and keep those who don't agree with them on the defensive. The left also knows using lies, inuendo, and half-truths is the best way of doing that. It never seems to fail. Watching someone on national TV, under the glaring lights and pressure from the pro-left media, trying to defend against a lie, gives most viewers the impression that the person is in fact, lying. Very simple, and oh so effective, especially when the audience is the weak-minded, brainless American people.

Anonymous said...

racist (adj.) - (1) hostile to individuals of a given ethnicity or ancestry, based on false beliefs of such individuals being inferior or undesirable; (2) Communist code word for "Stop! You're revealing the truth I don't want others to know!", uttered in a dishonest attempt to de-legitimize the target it is spoken against in the minds of others.