The Atlantic has a rather tepid piece on the SPLC’s target-placement on Maajid Nawaz.

Nawaz’s work has earned him detractors—critics claim he has embellished or neatened his narrative, some attack him for opportunism, and others question his liberal bona fides—but calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist” is a surprise. Unlike the likes of Gaffney and Geller, he doesn’t espouse the view that Islam itself is a problem; unlike Ali, who now describes herself as an atheist, Nawaz identifies as a Muslim.

That’s what I mean by tepid. Calling him that is more than a surprise, it’s a reckless and untrue calumny.

When I spoke to Nawaz on Thursday, he was both baffled and furious.

“They put a target on my head. The kind of work that I do, if you tell the wrong kind of Muslims that I’m an extremist, then that means I’m a target,” he said. “They don’t have to deal with any of this. I don’t have any protection. I don’t have any state protection. These people are putting me on what I believe is a hit list.”

And you would think that as an organization that tracks hate groups and violence, they would know that.

The report cited several counts against Nawaz. One is that he tweeted a cartoon of Muhammad—an intentionally provocative act, given that many Sunnis find it blasphemous to depict the prophet, but one that doesn’t fit neatly into the “anti-Islam” category.

I don’t believe it was “an intentionally provocative act” because I don’t think provocation was Maajid’s goal. I think his goal was what it said on the tin: to point out that Muslims don’t have to be outraged by cartoons like the Jesus and Mo one, and that it’s better to be relaxed about such things. He no doubt knew that some people would decide to be provoked by it, but that doesn’t mean he posted it in order to provoke them. Subtle, I know.

The most interesting is the fourth point, because it highlights a peculiar dynamic: The SPLC and Nawaz are each accusing the other of McCarthyism. The report states:

In the list sent to a top British security official in 2010, headlined “Preventing Terrorism: Where Next for Britain?” Quilliam wrote, “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.” An official with Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit told The Guardian that “[t]he list demonises a whole range of groups that in my experience have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism.”

Nawaz disputes the claim. Quilliam says the list in question was an appendix to a larger report, and simply a list of British Muslim organizations; in fact, he says, the point was to say that such groups should be legal, even if they were extremist, so long as they were not violent. “It wasn’t a terror list,” Nawaz said. “We were saying, don’t ban these groups. We’ve gone through the looking glass. It’s the direct opposite of my life’s work.”

…

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC who wrote the report (and has a long resume of similar work on extremists), told me that Quilliam’s list of groups was the linchpin of the case for Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist.

Well that seems like an incredibly weak and pathetic linchpin.

While Nawaz demanded a correction, retraction, and apology, Potok said none was coming.

One thing that seemed to particularly irk Nawaz was the fact that the report came from SPLC. While the group is controversial—and particularly loathed on the American right—Nawaz’s objection was that he has known and respected their work for years. “It lends the wingnuts a level of credibility,” he said.

Well exactly. If it were just some twerp, we would all have pointed and laughed and then moved on. The SPLC is not just some twerp, but it seems to have waded into this without doing any proper research.

A lawyer and law professor says the FBI director did a bad and possibly illegal thing.

The F.B.I. is currently investigating the hacking of Americans’ computers by foreign governments. Russia is a prime suspect.

Imagine a possible connection between a candidate for president in the United States and the Russian computer hacking. Imagine the candidate has business dealings in Russia, and has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack the email of his opponent and her associates.

It would not be surprising for the F.B.I. to include this candidate and his campaign staff in its confidential investigation of Russian computer hacking.

But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress from the party opposing the candidate that the candidate or his associates were under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.

The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.

Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election.

And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week.

By way of full disclosure he tells us what candidates he has supported in this election process – three Republicans and then Clinton.

On Friday, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, sent to members of Congress a letter updating them on developments in the agency’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, an investigation which supposedly was closed months ago. This letter, which was quickly posted on the internet, made highly unusual public statements about an F.B.I. investigation concerning a candidate in the election. The letter was sent in violation of a longstanding Justice Department policy of not discussing specifics about pending investigations with others, including members of Congress. According to some news reports on Saturday, the letter was sent before the F.B.I. had even obtained the search warrant that it needed to look at the newly discovered emails. And it was sent days before the election, at a time when many Americans are already voting.

This clarifies, for me at least, how extraordinary and reprehensible Comey’s action was.

Taslima tweeted this BBC feature:

Purnima Shil was gang-raped in northern Bangladesh at the age of 13 and she has not been allowed to forget it. Twelve years later, because of the stigma that attaches to rape victims in some parts of the country, someone shamed her by creating a pornographic Facebook page in her name – with her photograph and telephone number. This story is part of the BBC’s Shame series, which examines a disturbing new phenomenon – the use of private or sexually explicit images to blackmail and shame young people, mainly girls and women, in some of the world’s most conservatives societies.

The video is only 3 minutes. It’s powerful.

A tiny history lesson via Kevin Lamarque at Newsweek/Reuters.

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”

Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive.

Welllll maybe there was a lot of football to watch during those days. No, maybe he had a cold. No, maybe the Internet was down. No, maybe he just did everything over the phone.

…in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.

The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.

Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office were in the administration’s system but he couldn’t get them.

But that’s ok because REASONS.

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”

In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.

One rule for them, and another rule for everyone else.

Russia has lost its seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

Russia narrowly lost its seat on the main United Nations body devoted to human rights on Friday, signaling international dismay over the military power’s conduct in Syria.

The vote was to select countries to represent Eastern Europe on the United Nations Human Rights Council. Russia lost by two votes to Croatia and by 32 votes to Hungary. All 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted, and when the results were announced, there was a “small intake of air” in the large hall, said the New Zealand envoy, Gerard van Bohemen.

He said he believed that Russia’s conduct in the war in Syria, including the aerial bombardment of Aleppo, “must have played a part.”

The US got kicked off during the Bush administration.

The Human Rights Council is politically influential. Its responsibilities include establishing panels to investigate human rights abuses in specific countries. Human rights advocates had hoped that the council would impanel an inquiry into rights abuses in Yemen. It was vigorously opposed by Saudi Arabia, which was re-elected Friday for another three-year seat.

“It’s hard to imagine the atrocities happening in Aleppo were not on the minds of those casting their ballots today,” said Akshaya Kumar of Human Rights Watch, which had vigorously lobbied against both Russia and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. The group called for competitive elections for all geographic blocs.

Saudi Arabia is still on it (which is outrageous), Russia isn’t. Inches.

Silentbob alerted us to a juvenile elephant (not a baby) making sure her favorite human isn’t getting swept down the river.

Of course the first thing that everyone said, including me, when the Bundy verdict came out was that it will send a message to all the other “public lands are for us to exploit!!” crowd that they can get away with it. Of course.

The shocking acquittals of Ammon and Ryan Bundy, along with five other militants, in the armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife preserve is already emboldening anti-government extremists.

Two of the Bundy militants’ loudest cheerleaders, Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore and blogger Gavin Seim, are already signaling that additional actions may be taken against the federal government.

Let’s secede! And have a civil war! That was so much fun last time, and now the carnage would be massive.

Fiore, who lost her re-election campaign in the Republican primary, told a reporter that the not-guilty verdicts were a message that Americans need to stand up to unlawful behavior by government employees.

https://twitter.com/KirkSiegler/status/791795235684769792

Like working in wildlife refuges and unlawful shit like that. Yee-ha!

No, the investigation into Clinton’s emails hasn’t “re-opened.” The FBI is trying to fuck with the election.

FBI Director James Comey alerted Republican members of Congress on Friday that bureau investigators would review some additional emails that might relate to Hillary Clinton’s email server. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who has already vowed to spend the next several years investigating Clinton should she be elected president, quickly rushed to announce the news, falsely claiming that the case had been “reopened.”

https://twitter.com/jasoninthehouse/status/792047597040971776

And other Republicans followed suit, and news outlets took the bait, and Trump  gloated, and yadda yadda.

Though nothing in Comey’s letter said the case was being reopened, an array of news outlets repeated Chaffetz’s incorrect characterization. NBC News initially posted a story with this framing, later changing the headline and ledeto drop the claim. USA Today tweeted, falsely, that the FBI director had said the probe was being reopened. The Hill and Bloomberg also got the facts wrong.

But hey, that’s ok – it’s no big thing. It’s only whether or not the lying thieving sexually assaulting narcissist gets access to scary levels of power or not. No worries.

Despite the initial overreaction to the news, NBC’s Pete Williams has already reported that the newly found e-mails were not originally withheld by Clinton nor her campaign, the emails are not from Clinton, and the letter was sent to the Congressional leaders “out of an abundance of caution.” The AP reported that the emails did not come from Hillary Clinton’s private server. NBC’s sources called the story less than a game-changer.

But that did not stop Clinton’s critics from trying to turn it into one.

Because an exciting, though false, news item is always worth risking the fate of a country of 350 million people.

Via Pink News on Twitter:

Russia's UK embassy mocks Westerners as 'gay pigs' https://t.co/UmFaritp8S

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) October 24, 2016

Gay pigs in a concentration camp, at that – and cowering before a huge, biceps-displaying Russian bear.

Sarah Haider on the SPLC and that list.

Nuance is lost where the religion of peace is concerned, and the SPLC paints its targets with a broad, clumsy brush.  Those profiled range from pundits who believe that radicals have “infiltrated the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and State Department” to activists who offer compassionate, empathetic, and exceedingly balanced views on the faith. The latter is exemplified by the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who spent his formative years in the service of an Islamist organization working to re-establish a global caliphate. After disavowing his former associates, he has spent the past decade working to encourage reform and secularization in Muslim countries and communities.

Nearly every charge against him in the report is patently absurd. His act of solidarity with students who wore a benign cartoon of Prophet Muhammad on a t-shirt is a cited as a qualification for his “anti-Muslim extremism”. Nawaz tweeted a picture of the cartoon, declaring that such trifles don’t offend him.

She too wonders what the SPLC is doing policing such things.

If mere tweeting of cartoons is tantamount to bigotry, one wonders how they would judge the actions of the actual cartoonists. Perhaps the SPLC list should include the creators of the show South Park for their depictions of Jesus and Mohammed. In the same vein, Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ surely also qualifies him as an anti-Christian “extremist”, along with the National Endowment for the Arts that presented him with an award. But I won’t be holding my breath for the latter. In the eyes of some my fellow liberals, blasphemy is bigotry only when Islam is the target.

Nawaz’s entry reads like a gossip blog written by his most paranoid enemies, repeating debunked claims and rumors as factual evidence. In reference to his account of his journey to deradicalization, SPLC ominously contends that “major elements of his story have been disputed by former friends, members of his family, fellow jihadists and journalists”, neglecting to substantiate this damning assessment in any form whatsoever.

Let’s break that down, shall we?

Nawaz is a “reformist” Muslim, that is to say, he wishes to make changes to the way his fellow Muslims practice their faith. Anyone who takes on such a task (especially where Islam is concerned) will find themselves the target of smears and attacks from the religious conservatives.

In Nawaz’s case, the denunciations are by his former allies and associates – many the same conservative, even jihadi(!), persons and groups who he now challenges.

Reactionaries, in short. What is the SPLC doing citing them as a reason to malign Maajid?

She does an excellent take-down of the SPLC’s snide claim that he’s more interested in self-promotion than the substantive dispute with Islamism.

This is par for the course for confused regressive types: deny the individual the autonomy to name their own motivations, ascribe instead those more convenient to the narrative. A terrorist swears that it is his dedication to the religious faith that motivates his violence – regressives frantically search for other answers. Anti-fundamentalists like Nawaz declare a desire for a secular world as the fuel for their activism – regressives grasp at straws for evidence of a more nefarious agenda.

To the politically-motivated, it is of the utmost importance that the “narrative” around the religion of Islam remain undisturbed by critical voices. The good word has already been revealed: The ideology of Islam is, and always will be, entirely peaceful and good. The effect it has on its believers is, and always will be, entirely peaceful and good. When the faithful act in grotesque ways, the blame can only be placed on politics, poverty, or disposition. The mandates of the religion itself are beyond reproach, even by former or current Muslims.

How simple and delightful everything would be if only it were true that the ideology of Islam is, and always will be, entirely peaceful and good. But this is the real world, not the pink fluffy one in our dreams, so it’s not true.

Nawaz’s entry may have been the most clearly ludicrous, but other profiles are similarly problematic. SPLC points to valid, factual claims made by those profiled as “evidence” of their extremism as often as it identifies falsehoods. Worse, it pools compassionate, anti-war Muslims with the likes of those who really do want to bomb the Muslim world – enacting terrible harm to the public discourse in the process.

Consistently, the report conflates criticism or dislike of the religion as “hate” against its believers – effectively granting this particular religion a privilege no other ideology maintains. In this sense, the SPLC, considered by many to be a progressive institution, allies itself with the right-wing theocrats of the East.

80 years ago it was Uncle Joe; now it’s the Khalifa.

Amjad Khan at Sedaa suggests that the SPLC’s grotesque claims about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are rooted in an inadequate supply of racists at a time when the demand is higher than ever before.

Without the demand left-wing activists that organise themselves as anti-bigotry activists can’t justify their work and, more importantly, request for donations. Hence, the definition of bigotry needs to be stretched, new sources of bigotry need to be found and, eventually, critics of the regressive left find themselves being accused of bigotry.

I think the first three words should read “Without the supply” but we get the idea – there aren’t enough racists to keep anti-racism organizations busy and well funded. I don’t actually think that’s true – there are plenty of racists out there, as we know from news coverage of Trump rallies and the Brexit campaign, just for a start. It’s an interesting idea though.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), founded in Montgomery Alabama in 1971 as a civil rights organisation, is a prime example of an activist outfit that may have begun with noble aims but has now resorted to stretching definitions along with credulity. This group has decided to branch into anti-Muslim bigotry without any clear understanding of what that term really means. According to their website:

“Anti-Muslim hate groups also broadly defame Islam, which they tend to treat as a monolithic and evil religion. These groups generally hold that Islam has no values in common with other cultures, is inferior to the West and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion.”

The above quote illustrates the problem with SPLC’s approach to this subject. Individuals are well within their rights to dislike Islam as a religion, just as they are free to dislike any other religion or political ideology. Dislike of a faith is not tantamount to bigotry if it is not accompanied by demonisation of an entire people. Disliking Islam is not the same as disliking all Muslims; just as disliking smoking is not the same as disliking all smokers.

Yes, that passage does indeed illustrate the problem. God damn. “Defame” Islam? They sound like the enraged mobs in Pakistan, demanding the death of Asia Bibi or killing people on rumors of looking cross-eyed at a Koran. There’s no such thing as “defamation” of a religion, or a political party or a philosophical view or an opinion about economics.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the SLPC report is the inclusion of British former-extremist and pro-reform campaigner Maajid Nawaz, a man who was never critiqued when he was an actual extremist but widely denounced by the regressive left when he spoke out against extremism. In the report, Maajid is accused of demonising Muslim groups in the UK by producing a ‘terror list’, insisting it is reasonable to ask women to remove the niqab in security sensitive environments, tweeting a blasphemous cartoon and visiting a strip club whilst claiming to be a devout Muslim and a feminist.

The ‘terror list’ in question was actually an appendix titled ‘The British Muslim Scene’ that categorised a range of prominent British Muslim organisations. It placed groups like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain in the Muslim Brotherhood camp, which is accurate and widely acknowledged. None of the groups in question have publicly challenged this categorisation to my knowledge.

Muslim women are already expected to reveal their faces in security sensitive environments across the Muslim world. Try getting through Saudi customs dressed in a niqab — you will be asked to remove it so that they can see who you are. Is Saudi Arabia also anti-Muslim?

How is tweeting an image of Muhammad anti-Muslim? Many Muslims do consider images of Muhammad blasphemous but equally many do not. For example, in Shia Islam images of holy figures are allowed and even encouraged. Furthermore, Islamic history is replete with images of Muhammad being drawn and painted, as this piece explains.

It’s mind-boggling that the SPLC saw fit to include that tweet as a reason to label Maajid an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

Maajid also accompanied his tweet with the words ‘As a Muslim, I am not offended’, meaning the purpose of his tweet was to challenge the idea that Muslims are keen to take offence at bland cartoons. This was an important point to make in the wake of various cartoon controversies that led to the death of many people around the world and garnered bad publicity for Muslims in the process. To deem such a tweet ‘anti-Muslim’ is ignorant, immature and quite frankly dangerous.

Finally, visiting a strip club or having a lap dance is not anti-Muslim bigotry. I can’t believe I have had to type that sentence. It is a personal choice that says very little about one’s political or religious views. Maajid does not claim to be a devout Muslim; in fact he is often at pains to point out that he is non-devout.

It has nothing whatever to do with anti-Muslim bigotry, and including it made the SPLC sound like an angry child listing all the reasons “I hate you I hate you I hate you!!!”

It seems the SPLC gathered a list of political commentators that it did not like and who have been critical of the regressive left and their narrow ideological goals, and decided to smear them. Whilst their list does include some genuine anti-Muslim bigots they have failed to distinguish between those critical of extremism and those who dislike Muslims per se. In doing so, they have put lives at risk in a cheap ploy to create demand, garner support and remain relevant.

It’s a sad irony that they did it the day before the Bundy verdict came down. There’s plenty of real racist extremism for them to report, they don’t need to inflate the lists with people who don’t belong there.