The Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), based in Montgomery, Alabama, has struck again. The self-appointed boundary-markers and policemen of free discussion have issued what they call a “Field Guide” to help “guide” the media in “countering prominent anti-Muslim extremists.” It is hard to know where to start with such idiocy, so let us start from the beginning.

The SPLC was founded in 1971, ostensibly to fight for civil rights among other good causes. By the end of its first decade it was targeting the KKK and other racist organisations. So far so good. But like many a campaigning organisation, they experienced the happy blow of basically winning their argument. By the 1990s, there were mercifully few racist groups in America going about unchallenged. When a member of the KKK cropped up everybody in civil society pretty much understood that here was a bad person who should not be given a free pass.

But there is an odd trait in campaigning groups that is well known. Once they have achieved their objective, they continue. Why is this so? Usually it is because there are people with salaries at stake, pensions, perks and more. Campaigning for a particular thing or against a particular thing has become their way of life and their means of earning. And so they find a way to continue. For some years, the SPLC staggered around in such a manner, as pointless and purposeless an organisation as could be imagined.

And then in the last decade something happened to this increasingly obscure institution. It is not for me to speculate why or how this happened, whether it had to do with new staff or new money, but the focus of the organisation changed. Suddenly the SPLC seemed to spy a new fascism. They did not spy it in people who flew planes into skyscrapers, decapitated American journalists and aid workers or blew up the finish line of marathons. No, the SPLC saw it somewhere else. The SPLC saw this new fascism in people who objected to people flying planes into skyscrapers, decapitating journalists and aid workers and blowing up the finish line of marathons. For the SPLC, the big threat on the horizon was not Islamists but those people who objected to Islamists — that is, people they called “Islamophobes.” In the same way, they did not seem to have any particular problem with jihad, but they developed a huge problem with people they called “counter-jihadists.” To their existing lists of designated “hate-groups” they now added such people.

More honest groups might have balked at such a stance. More informed groups would have walked a thousand miles from such a stance. But the SPLC did no such thing. In fact, one got the impression that it had become immensely useful for some people to be able to smear those concerned about Islamic fundamentalism and try to make them akin to Nazis. The only other movements who find this equally useful are, of course, Islamic extremists.

More here.