The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), arbiter of “extremism,” recently had one of its targets bite back. Defamation can be expensive.
From Fox News:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) announced [June 19] that it would pay $3.375 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a British anti-extremism group that was put on a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”
In a statement, the Alabama-based SPLC apologized to the [London-based] Quilliam Foundation and its founder, Maajid Nawaz.
…In 2016, the SPLC included Nawaz and Quilliam in an online publication called “A Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” The list, which included conservative blogger Pamela Geller and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, drew ire from across the political spectrum.
…The list has since been removed from the SPLC’s website and replaced with the statement apologizing to Nawaz and Quilliam.
The Quilliam Foundation is described in Wikipedia as “a London-based left-of-centre think tank that focuses on counter-extremism, specifically against Islamism, which it argues represents a desire to impose a given interpretation of Islam on society.”
News of the settlement was greeted eagerly by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, another of SPLC’s targets. In 2012, a domestic terrorist attacked FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C., after “he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Perkins said after the Quilliam settlement was announced, “This public acknowledgment of their defamatory actions leave the media and big business with no excuse in continuing to use the SPLC as an objective, independent source.”
Read FRC’s full statement here.
