04 November 2016

Fetishising Fundamentalists & Resisting Reformers: Maajid Nawaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the SPLC?

Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim co-founder of Quilliam, the UK’s first counter-extremism organisation, has been listed - with no sense of irony - by the SPLC as an anti-muslim bigot. Likewise, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the feminist who endured FGM and fled a forced marriage has been shamed by the SPLC as a key collaborator in anti-muslim bigotry - because of her rhetoric on the topic of Islam.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre lists their values and aims on their website: fighting hate, teaching tolerance, seeking justice, memorialising civil rights leaders; alongside quotes from RFK and pictures of MLK, just so you know they are serious about it. And like both RFK and MLK, the SPLC condones a muscular liberalism where pressure groups and social movements urge the mainstream - as well as the fringe - to give them equal dignity.

The SPLC, however, has now decided to radically pivot on all of their core beliefs - assuming they ever really believed them. They have come out against condemning homophobes, they are now at least complicit in the forced slavery of women, they offer tacit encouragement to the most retrograde conservative injunctions; and they have done this by smearing the leaders of the most important minority cohort in our politics - Islamic Reformers. [Conatus News] Read more