by Grania Spingies

Ahnaf Kalam has posted an update to his petition at Change.org [JAC: it now has almost 9,000 signatures]:

“Today, I was informed that the Southern Poverty Law Center has no intention of removing Maajid Nawaz from their list. ”

You can read the full statement here. This is the bit that makes my hair stand on end.

Apart from the frankly bizarre claim of “conspiracy theory” talk which makes me think that Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the SPLC, has never spent much time listening to Maajid Nawaz speak at all; the more chilling claim is that she (and presumably the SPLC) have already decided what the only acceptable talking points about Islam are. Any deviation from this will be punished.

She’s essentially engaging in rather dangerous and illiberal speech of her own. It is unbelievably chilling and threatening for her and her organisation to publicly denigrate and dismiss the work of Muslim (and ex-Muslim) men and women trying to reform aspects of their own religion.

I’ll leave you with a few clips of the sort of talk that appears to be “dangerous” and laden with “conspiracy theories”.