“They go low, we go high.” “Love trumps hate.” The left, as we learned from the recent presidential campaign, is all about love. And hope. And, naturally, fighting hate.

Thus the name of the British organization Hope Not Hate. I’ve written about it before. It describes itself as an anti-fascist monitoring group, and the mainstream media, with few exceptions, routinely echo this self-description. In fact, however, HnH, founded in 2004, is far from what it pretends to be. Think of it as Britain’s answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center: a vicious smear machine masquerading as a virtuous anti-hate group.

It was Hope Not Hate that successfully campaigned to have Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller banned from the U.K. because of their criticism of Islam. It was Hope Not Hate that slandered me and several dozen other critics of Islam in an outrageously mendacious “Counter-Jihad Report” that actually juxtaposed photos of David Horowitz and Geert Wilders with one of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (complete with gun). It was Hope Not Hate that spent the run-up to the Brexit vote demonizing UKIP, the anti-EU party, which it routinely treated as racist, xenophobic, and neo-Nazi scum.

HnH’s modus operandi is always consistent: instead of engaging the arguments of its ideological opponents in a fair, factual way, it maligns us, misrepresents us, and does its damnedest to destroy our reputations. The ultimate goal, plainly, is to try to make us shut up and go away.

Now they’re at it again. Their latest target: none other than former UKIP head and Brexit hero Nigel Farage. After the December 19 attack in Berlin, Farage tweeted that such events “will be the Merkel legacy.” Merkel, he wrote, had “blood on her hands.” Farage was hardly alone in this opinion: perhaps the most common Facebook meme during the hours after the attack was a picture of Merkel with, yes, blood on her hands.

More here.