Southern Poverty Law Center Slurs Pamela Geller's SIOA as 'Hate Group'

The story's at New York Daily News, but notice how the designation includes Geller's "followers."

Hey, badge of honor. I hung out with both Pamela and Robert Spencer on the first day at CPAC. I'm probably more than a "follower." Maybe an "evil" co-conspirator for the preservation of American freedom. Oh, that sounds terrible. Can't stand up for liberty these days without being slurred as racist, that's for sure. Anyway, PR Newswire has this, "Human Rights Organization SIOA Vows to Fight Far-Left Propaganda Group's 'Hate Group' Designation":

A prominent national human rights and advocacy organization has vowed to fight against its designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-Left propaganda group, as a "hate group."

The day after yet another deadly Islamic jihad terror plot involving weapons of mass destruction was thwarted in Texas, the SPLC issued its latest list of hate groups, including Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).

SIOA Executive Director Pamela Geller declared in a statement: "It's outrageous that the SPLC designates a group dedicated to protecting the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and legal equality for all Americans as a 'hate group.' The SPLC, instead of standing for those freedoms, is carrying water for the real haters, the real neo-Nazi Jew-haters: the forces of Islamic supremacism and jihad. The SPLC doesn't even have a category for Islamic jihadi groups. The greatest threat facing our nation, our people, our world, and they are shilling for them."

SIOA Associate Director Robert Spencer pointed out that the Islamic supremacist hate group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which the Justice Department designated an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case and has had several of its officials convicted of jihad terror activity, is not listed by the SPLC as a hate group. "That the SPLC would list SIOA and not CAIR as a hate group shows the hollowness and political motivation of the SPLC's classifications," Spencer said.

The Washington Times reported in November 2010 that "the SPLC is a small, hard-left political activist outfit known for promoting a panoply of radical liberal causes. The Center holds itself out as an objective monitor of potentially violent or subversive hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and other white supremacists.

"But in recent years - and with increasing abandon - the SPLC has leveraged (abused, really) its rapidly decreasing political capital and waning credibility to target and undermine organizations that, rather than dealing in the business of genuine 'hate,' instead pose a direct threat to the advancement of postmodern secular-socialism generally - and to the Democratic Party specifically. ... In sum, the SPLC has become an extremist wolf in 'watchdog' clothing."

"My group is a human rights group," Geller said. "And these people are taken seriously? This is the morally inverted state of the world."

And see Pamela's, "Southern Poverty Law Center Maligns SIOA as 'Hate Group'."

I'm looking at the list at SPLC, and it includes the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero. Seriously. A Christian Center at Ground Zero is designated as a hate group, but the Park51 jihadis are in the clear. It's like Pamela says, "This is the morally inverted state of the world."