In October 2016, amid a series of Islamist terrorist attacks that had tragically taken the lives of my friend Theo van Gogh, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, attendees of the Bataclan concert in Paris, and patrons of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) took a significant step. From their headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, they released a document entitled ‘A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.’
My name appeared on that list.
The document also included activists such as Maajid Nawaz, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz, alongside others. Our apparent offense was advocating for the notion that Islam, like any other set of beliefs, should be open to critique, reform, and public discourse.
To clarify the situation in 2016, I was far from an unknown figure. In fact, I was already forced into hiding.
The brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh occurred on an Amsterdam street, where his killer left a note pinned to his body with a knife, threatening that I was next in line.
By that time, I had experienced life under police protection across two continents. I was already the target of potential violence. However, the SPLC’s actions effectively amplified that danger, painting a larger target on my back and extending an open invitation to any jihadist with a computer and a vendetta.
The ‘Journalist’s Manual’ was framed as a warning to the public. To me, it was a hit list.
The assassin who shot, stabbed and decapitated Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker, on an Amsterdam street had pinned a note to Theo’s chest with a knife promising I would be next (Pictured: Van Gogh murder scene in 2004)
An injured person is transported to an ambulance after a shooting at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris, France in January 2015
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack
The SPLC has, for a decade now, trafficked in something I recognize from the Islamist milieu of my youth: the blacklist.
When Theo was assassinated in broad daylight, he was on a list.
When Bangladeshi secularist bloggers were hacked to death by machete in 2015 in Dhaka, they were on a list.
The mechanism is not obscure. Some authority publishes the names; the zealots do the rest.
Why had the SPLC, founded in 1971 to protect the hard-earned gains of the civil rights movement and which had once sued the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, begun to traffic in such methods of intimidation?
Now, we may know. By 2014, the SPLC appears to have abandoned its mission and become a fundraising machine that required a steady pipeline of enemies to justify its existence.
The US Department of Justice alleged in an indictment on Tuesday that for eight years, the SPLC covertly paid more than $3 million to members of Ku Klux Klan, National Socialist Movement and other similarly abhorrent organizations to become their informants.
These hate-group insiders allegedly feed the SPLC with information that the SPLC then used to drum up more donations.
The DOJ has charged the SPLC with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and making false statements. The group denies all the charges and has pledged to defend itself in court.
The DOJ has charged the SPLC with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and making false statements (Pictured: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announcing indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21
The US Department of Justice alleged in an indictment on Tuesday that for eight years the SPLC covertly paid more than $3 million to members of abhorrent organizations
According to the indictment, the SPLC transferred $270,000 over several years to one individual it internally designated ‘F-37.’ F-37 allegedly sat in the online leadership chat that organized the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, authored racist posts ‘under the supervision of the SPLC’ and helped arrange transportation for rally attendees.
Let me restate this in plain English, because the gravity of it depends on being understood: the organization that put my name on a journalist’s blacklist for criticizing political Islam appears to have been, during those same years, writing checks to a man who helped stage a tiki-torch parade through the streets of Charlottesville, during which marchers chanted ‘Jews will not replace us.’
Donor money from liberals in Brooklyn and Berkeley — money given, they presumably believed, to fight hate — was allegedly routed through shell entities with names like ‘Fox Photography’ and ‘Rare Books Warehouse’ to help stage a Nazi rally, so that the SPLC could then raise money condemning the Nazi rally.
At the end of the last fiscal year, the SPLC’s endowment exceeded $730 million.
It is difficult to invent a more perfect closed loop. If Kafka had lived to see it, he would have retired from satire on the grounds that reality had made him redundant.
And that, of course, was only part of the SPLC scheme.
For if the actual Klan wasn’t producing enough supply, well, there were always reformist Muslims, evangelical Christians, and conservative mothers to draft into the role. But by expanding the definition of ‘hate’ to include me, the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU, the SPLC sabotaged their own fight against bigotry and injustice.
When everything is hate, nothing is.
According to the indictment, the SPLC transferred $270,000 over several years to one individual it internally designated ‘F-37,’ who sat in the online leadership chat that organized the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville (pictured)
When a Somali ex-Muslim campaigning against honor killings is placed in the same taxonomy as the National Socialist Movement, the category becomes a joke and the truly evil are the only ones laughing.
I have watched, with sickened recognition, as figures like Nick Fuentes, a genuine, self-identifying admirer of Hitler who denies the Holocaust on camera and tells his young male audience that Jewish people are the enemy, have ridden the confusion into the mainstream.
The SPLC did not create Fuentes. But by crying wolf for decades at every conservative grandmother with a Bible study, it helped ensure that when a real wolf arrived, half the country had exhausted its capacity to be alarmed.
I have spent twenty years being told by people, many of them intelligent and well-meaning, that my fears about ideological blacklists were overwrought. That the people building these lists were the good guys. That I should trust the institutions.
But two decades ago, the idea that the country’s premier ‘anti-hate’ organization would write checks to the actual organizer of Charlottesville would have sounded like the rantings of a man shouting at pigeons.
Today, it is in a federal indictment.
