PRI, Public Radio International, did a story on the SPLC report yesterday.

The list is primarily meant to be a resource for journalists, says Mark Potok, a senior fellow with the SPLC. He says it is especially intended to help producers who schedule experts for TV appearances.

“There are an awful lot of people out there who present themselves as ‘experts’ on terrorism or on Islam, who really are people who make it their business simply to savage Islam,” Potok says.

That’s true…but Maajid is not one of them, so why is he on that list?

The list is only 15 people after all. With such a small number why include at least two people who don’t belong there? Think … Read the rest

On Saturday I wrote to the SPLC. Here’s what I said:

Like many people, I’m horrified by the inclusion in the SPLC’s report on “Anti-Muslim extremists” of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Please don’t send me the stock response from Heidi Beirich, because I’ve already seen it via several people. I want to ask you for more explanation of two items in that response.

First, Heidi Beirich writes:

We respectfully disagree with your assessment that Nawaz is “non-extremist.” Let me cite some examples as to why we came to this conclusion. For starters, his organization sent a letter to a security official, according to The Guardian, that said, “the ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that

More detail on the SPLC’s blacklisting of Maajid Nawaz.

Their report cited the Guardian in this passage:

But major elements of his story have been disputed by former friends, members of his family, fellow jihadists and journalists, and the evidence suggests that Nawaz is far more interested in self-promotion and money than in any particular ideological dispute. He told several different versions of his story, emphasizing that he was deradicalized while in Egypt — even though he in fact continued his Islamist agitation for months after returning. After starting the Quilliam Foundation, which he describes as an anti-extremism think tank, Nawaz sent a secret list to a top British security official that accused “peaceful Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel

Yahoo News reports on the expanding controversy over the SPLC’s targeting of Maajid Nawaz, but it unfortunately is very sloppy with the facts.

Nawaz’s history places him in a unique position for encouraging reform within Islam. He is the founding chairman and executive board member of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank that fights for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy.

As evidence of his alleged anti-Muslim extremism, the SPLC report cites an op-ed he wrote for the Daily Mail arguing that the veil should be barred in schools, a cartoon he tweeted of the Prophet Muhammad (which some Muslims consider blasphemous) and his trip to a strip club during a bachelor party (which seems irrelevant to

Kaveh Mousavi sent the SPLC a letter telling them to add him to their list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”

To Whom It May Concern,
Southern Poverty Law Center

I recently came across your report on “anti-Muslim extremists” which includes the names of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I write to you in order to cordially ask you to include my name in the list as an example of an awful extremist. Following you will see my justification for this humble request.

I am an atheist living in Iran. The name you see here is not my real name, that is due to my extremism. As a bigot, I believe that there is no God, and that there should be dissenting

Nick Cohen on the SPLC’s fatwa.

Nick is no fan of UK libel laws, and has put in a lot of time campaigning against them. But yesterday he advised Maajid to sue, and gave him the names of some lawyers.

The attack he is facing is so grotesque, ferocious remedies seem the only response.

Nawaz’s enemy is not the usual user of the libel law: a Putin frontman or multinational. It is an organisation that ought to share Nawaz’s values, but because of the crisis in left-wing values does the dirty work of the misogynists, the racists, the homophobes, the censors, and the murderers it was founded to oppose. It does it with a straight face because, as I

Maajid has written a response to the SPLC, at the Daily Beast. He wants it widely shared.

Through the counter-extremism organisation Quilliam that I founded, I have spent eight years defending my Muslim communities in Europe, Pakistan  and beyond from the diktats of Islamist theocrats. I have also argued for the liberal reform of Islam today, from within. But, in a naively dangerous form of neo-Orientalism, the SPLC just arrogated to itself the decision over which debates we Muslims may have about reforming our own religion, and which are to be deemed beyond the pale.

Let us call it “Islamsplaining.”

In a monumental failure of comprehension, the SPLC have conflated my challenge to Islamist theocracy among my fellow Muslims