Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine, February 20, 2017

Look out! It’s another fake Islamophobia crisis.

“Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report,” wails NBC News. “Watchdog: Number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015,” FOX News bleats. ABC News vomits up this word salad. “Trump cited in report finding increase in US hate groups for 2nd year in a row.”

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The Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate group” sightings claims that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016.”

That’s a lot of folds.

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But there’s actually another phenomenon responsible for this startling rise reported by the SPLC.

The SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America as separate groups.

How do you get a sudden rise from 34 to 101 hate groups? It helps to suddenly add 45 chapters of one group. Act for America isn’t a hate group. It’s also just as obviously not 45 groups.

And it didn’t come into existence last year.

Act for America was only listed as one group in the 2015 list. It shot up to 45 now.

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Furthermore Act for America boasts not 45, but 1,000 chapters across the country. Why list just 45 of them? Look at it from the SPLC’s perspective. Next year, it can add 200 chapters and claim that anti-Muslim hate groups once again tripled. And then it can do the same thing again the year after that.

That way the Southern Poverty Law Center can keep manufacturing an imaginary Islamophobia crisis.

Also added to the list is Altra Firearms: a gun store that ran an ad declaring that it wouldn’t sell firearms to Clinton supporters or Muslims.

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The list has added Bosch Fawstin: an artist who was the target of the first ISIS terror attack in America during the assault on the Draw Mohammed cartoon contest. The SPLC announced that it was adding the Eisner nominated artist to its list of hate groups after he survived the attack.

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Bosch Fawstin is a courageous activist. He’s also an individual. As am I. And the SPLC also has me up as a hate group. Other individual bloggers on the list include Atlas Shrugs, Refugee Resettlement Watch, Bare Naked Islam and Citizen Warrior.

6 of the SPLC’s “hate groups” are actually individuals. It’s understandable that the Southern Poverty Law Center is vague on the definition of hate. But you would think that it could figure out the definition of “group.”

No such luck.

The SPLC lists the David Horowitz Freedom Center as a hate group. But then again it also lists the American College of Pediatricians and the Jewish Political Action Committee as hate groups.

It doesn’t take much to be listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

You don’t need to be a group to be listed by the SPLC as a hate group.

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The rest of the SPLC’s “increase” is padded out with assorted community groups opposed to refugee resettlement, such as Treasure Valley Refugee Watch, and any Christian ministry it doesn’t like.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center is greedy, cynical and dishonest. Its latest ploy to gain headlines by inflating a group it had formerly listed as 1 organization into 45 by listing each chapter separately is the sort of behavior you expect from a lazy college student, not one of the wealthiest organizations in the country. And yet no one in the media will call out the SPLC for its greed, its bigotry and its lies.

The SPLC climbs into bed with extremists and terrorists and it smears counterterrorism organizations. It helps terrorists target their critics. And it solicits money through shameless lies.

It’s easy to indict the SPLC. But every indictment of the SPLC is also an indictment of a Fake News media that repeats its absurd lies without ever checking its facts.

When the media reports that there was a huge rise in anti-Muslim groups because the Southern Poverty Law Center turned 1 group into 45, it proves that it really is in the Fake News business.