The Southern Poverty Law Center, which attacks with “hater” labels anyone, even Dr. Ben Carson, who disagrees with its pro-homosexual social agenda, was reprimanded by the Obama Department of Justice a year ago for its “personal, baseless and below-the-belt” statements, but the scolding was kept quiet by the federal agency.
The reprimand was revealed in a report by officials with the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch, who said they obtained a copy of a letter including the scolding to the “radical leftist” group.
“The previously undisclosed DOJ rebuke is a vindication for groups targeted by the SPLC’s witch hunts and is especially impactful because the Obama administration was tight with the SPLC and even hired the controversial nonprofit to conduct diversity training for the government,” Judicial Watch said.
Its report described the SPLC as “an extremist nonprofit that lists conservative organizations that disagree with it on social issues on a catalogue of ‘hate groups.'”
Probably most famous was its connection in court to a domestic terrorist who admitted he tried to kill as many people as he could at the Christian Family Research Council in Washington in 2012.
According to the legal team at Liberty Counsel, which also has been targeted by SPLC, by “falsely and recklessly labeling Christian ministries as ‘hate groups,’ SPLC is directly responsible for the first conviction of a man who intended to commit mass murder targeted against a policy organization in Washington, D.C.”
“On August 15, 2012, Floyd Corkins went to the Family Research Council with a gun and a bag filled with ammunition and Chick-fil-A sandwiches. His stated purpose was to kill as many employees of the Family Research Council as possible and then to smear Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces (because the founder of the food chain said he believed in marriage as a man and a woman). Fortunately, Mr. Corkins was stopped by the security guard, who was shot in the process. Corkins is now serving time in prison. Mr. Corkins admitted to the court that he learned of the Family Research Council by reading the SPLC’s hate map.”
WND reported a video showed Corkins entering the FRC offices and confronting Leo Johnson.
[jwplayer UfJlrAZI]
Corkins later was sentenced to prison for domestic terrorism. It was during an interview with FBI officers when Corkins named the Southern Poverty Law Center as his source of information.
Central to the case, according to the government’s document, was that Corkins “had identified the FRC as an anti-gay organization on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.”
FRC officials repeatedly have explained that they adhere to a biblical perspective on homosexuality but are not “anti-gay.”
The new report from Judicial Watch cited a letter to Michael M. Hethmon, senior counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, and others.
Judicial Watch explained the DOJ reprimand came in 2016 “but [was] kept quiet at the agency’s request.”
“[It] involves the SPLC’s atrocious behavior during immigration court proceedings. Two groups that oppose illegal immigration, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), were the target of personal, baseless and below-the-belt attacks from SPLC attorneys during official immigration court proceedings. The SPLC filed a motion attacking and defaming the two respected nonprofits by describing them as ‘white supremacist,’ ‘eugenicist,’ ‘anti-Semitic,’ and ‘anti-Catholic.’ In its reprimand the DOJ says it is troubled by the conduct of SPLC lawyer Christopher Strawn and that his conduct ‘overstepped the bounds of zealous advocacy and was unprofessional.’ Furthermore, SPLC made ‘uncivil comments that disparaged FAIR and its staff,’ the rebuke states, adding that the language constitutes frivolous behavior and doesn’t aid in the administration of justice,” Judicial Watch explained.
“The Obama administration kept the reprimand confidential and asked FAIR and IRLI to keep it under wraps. In the meantime, SPLC continues to publicly trash the groups and escalate attacks against them by putting them on the official hate list. The executive director and general counsel of IRLI, Dale Wilcox, says his nonprofit and FAIR will keep fighting for immigration policies that put America first. ‘The SPLC’s latest tactic in its never-ending witch-hunt and the federal government’s resulting reprimand should send the following message to the mainstream media,’ Wilcox said: ‘Stop using the SPLC as a legitimate hate-watch source in your news coverage. That a cabal of biased list-keepers can play such an important role in distorting the immigration debate in this country is testament to the utter failure of much of the mainstream media which frequently publishes their inflammatory commentary and refuses to question their baseless methods or financial motivations,'” Judicial Watch said.
The letter explained the DOJ stopped short of “formal disciplinary proceeding[s],” instead opting for the rebuke in the letter.
“We take this opportunity to remind the attorney practitioners involved in this misconduct that practitioners before EOIR should be striving to be civil and professional in their interactions with each other, the public, the board and immigration courts. Attorneys owe a duty of professionalism to their clients, opposing parties and their counsel, the courts, and the public as a whole.”
The SPLC recently was listed as among the top 10 enemies that have attacked WND over the years.
In fact, WND not only earned recognition from the Southern Poverty Law Center on its latest list of “extremists,” but WND Books earned a special, separate, recognition.
Reason magazine, the libertarian publication, noting SPLC was “counting extremists again,” pointed out the list includes WND and WND Books and asked: “What on earth could justify that?”
Judicial Watch also reported another agenda item for the SPLC:
“In 2015, the SPLC issued a hit list of U.S. women against Shariah law, the authoritarian doctrine that inspires Islamists and their jihadism. This included a starter kit for Islamists to attack American women who refuse to comply with Sharia law and a detailed list of female bloggers, activist and television personalities who reject Shariah law, which is rooted in the Quran. Among those targeted were colleagues and friends of Judicial Watch who fear for their safety simply for practicing their rights under the U.S. Constitution. That SPLC hate list is titled Women Against Islam/The Dirty Dozen and includes illustrations and detailed information on all the women, who are branded ‘the core of the anti-Muslim radical right.’ The SPLC hate brochure further targets them by claiming that they’re ‘a dozen of the most hardline anti-Muslim women activists in America.'”
WND reported earlier this year that the SPLC was being used as an online resource for school teachers and children across America by Newsela.
The company describes itself as “an education technology startup dedicated to transforming the way students access the world through words.”
“Our team combines powerful technological know-how with real-world experience earned in the classroom, the newsroom, and the boardroom. We publish high-interest news and nonfiction articles daily at five levels of complexity for grades 2-12 using a proprietary, rapid text-leveling process. By combining relevant and interesting nonfiction content with standards-aligned assessments, Newsela gives educators the primary solution to dramatically improve students’ literacy skills for the 21st century.”
Essentially, Newsela offers online lessons to teachers, who can use then as an ongoing resource much like the “Weekly Reader,” the Scholastic publication for school children that dates to about 1928.
It offers library resources “news” on a variety of topics and various “text sets” for teachers to use.
An announcement from Newsela explains it is offering a “new program” to “teach empathy and diversity.”
“This coming at a time when our country is seeing an uptick in bullying and hate-crimes in schools, and an increasingly divisive tone when it comes to the ‘other.’ The program entitled ‘A Mile in Our Shoes’ is designed to help kids across the country begin to soften their tone and broaden their horizons.”
For that effort, Newsela says it is “is partnering with Teaching Tolerance (a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center).”
Under SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance instructional materials, which it posts not on the SPLC site, but on the Tolerance.org site, SPLC boasts of “webinars [that] offer helpful guidance and great ideas, from our highly experienced teaching and learning specialists and from other educators in the Teaching Tolerance community.”
For example, one seminar talks about “extreme prejudice” and warns of “anti-Muslim rhetoric” following the Muslim terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino and other cities.
“The truth is, even before the Paris attacks, the California chapter of CAIR, released survey results showing more than half of California’s Muslim students endure bullying based on their religion,” it states.
But SPLC’s source has been rejected by the FBI “due to questions about the Hamas ties of its top leaders” and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-financing case in American history.
The United Arab Emirates classifies CAIR as a terrorist organization.
Also among the SPLC teaching tools recommended by Newsela, which boasts of being used in three-quarters of U.S. schools and by over 10 million students and 1 million teachers, are titles such as “Confronting implicit bias,” “Teaching Black Lives Matter,” “Developing Empathy,” “Understanding Equity Literacy” and “Engaging Families Through Home Visits,” which instructs school teachers how to set up times to go to students’ homes, “sit down on a couch, have a normal conversation, [get] tours of the home, check out the kiddos’ selection of toys.”
