Tag: SPLC

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 of all the actual nasties they left off.

PRI notes that the inclusion of Maajid and Ayaan Hirsi Ali raised some eyebrows.

Nawaz is a British Muslim and a self-declared ex-jihadist. He is a writer and activist, far better known in Britain than the US, and the co-founder of a think tank in London called Quilliam, which describes its mission as countering the narratives put out by Islamist extremists.

But the SPLC describes Nawaz as a self-promoting hypocrite. And worst of all, the SPLC’s Potok says, is that Nawaz has accused peaceful Muslim organizations of being connected somehow to extremist groups.

“We think that Nawaz is very wrongheaded and under the appearance of only attacking radical Islam, in fact, is attacking Islam in general,” Potok says.

But they shouldn’t “think” that, when there’s plenty of easily available evidence that he is not attacking Islam in general, and pretty much no evidence that he is. They shouldn’t think it and they sure as hell shouldn’t issue a report saying it.

And it’s not “somehow.” A group can be peaceful and still advocate a bad, coercive, theocratic ideology. There’s no mystery in that, no need to say “somehow” – we’re all quite familiar with the phenomenon.

Nawaz has his defenders, though. They say his voice is exactly what is needed to stand up for Muslims and confront the real Muslim extremists.

“Maajid Nawaz … is a liberal in the greatest sense of the term,” says James Kirchick, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative think-tank in Washington. Kirchick is also a correspondent for the Daily Beast.

That’s rather sloppy journalism. It’s factually untrue that Maajid “is attacking Islam in general” and PRI should have had the guts to say so. They shouldn’t be helping Potok throw more shit at him.

In a robust self-defense in the Daily Beast, Nawaz writes that, “Nothing good ever comes from compiling lists.” And he accuses the SPLC of engaging in McCarthyist tactics.

Nawaz says Muslim radicals already want him dead, because he’s a liberal Muslim challenging Islamic extremism from within the Muslim community.

But Omid Safi is not buying it. Safi is the director of the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University.

“Someone like Maajid Nawaz is … a very complicated person,” Safi says. “It’s not so much that Maajid Nawaz hates Islam or that he hates all Muslims.

“He actually has a very specific agenda, and it’s an agenda that actually fosters the process of doing surveillance, not on the basis of what people have done, but on the basis of who they are ethnically and religiously.”

Oh please. That’s like saying it’s an agenda that fosters surveillance to pay attention to what Trump supporters do and say and think. It’s like saying it’s an agenda that fosters surveillance to pay attention to the Bundy gang and their fans, or Trump himself, or the KKK, or the Vatican, or the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, or you name it. Yes, actually, we do need to pay attention to ideologies that would rule over us if they attained power.

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has come out in support of Nawaz and Ali, calling both of them Muslim reformers. There is also a Change.org petition calling for both of their names to be removed from the SPLC’s list.

But the SPLC says it has no plans to make any changes to its list of anti-Muslim extremists.

The SPLC has no plans to admit its gross errors of fact and try to undo the damage it’s done. The SPLC stinks.

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 of violent Islamists.”’

Please explain. Why do you think it’s false and/or anti-Muslim to say that the ideology of Islamism is broadly the same apart from the espousal of violence? Are you not aware that Islamism is not the same thing as Islam? Are you assuming that all Muslims embrace Islamism? If so you’re very wrong indeed. Islamism is the theocratic ideology that Islam should be the source of law and entwined with government.

You really should consult with some liberal secularist Muslims, such as for instance my friends Tehmina Kazi, Elham Manea, Lejla Kuric, Sara Khan, Raquel Evita Saraswati. They could explain to you how terrible Islamism is for women, and how wrong outsiders are to think all Muslims are Islamists. I’ll introduce you if you like.

Second:

Finally, in reference to the “Jesus and Mo” cartoon tweet, depicting the Prophet Mohammad in any form is a very offensive thing for Muslims…

No no no. Again you are assuming that Muslims in general are as narrow and intolerant as the most fundamentalist reactionary segments. You are assuming that the only authentic Muslim is a fanatical Muslim. Can you not see how insulting that is? My liberal Muslim friends can, I promise you!

You wouldn’t assume that the Westboro Baptists are the only authentic Christians. Why do you assume that illiberal intolerant Islamists are the only authentic Muslims?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely, etc

That is, obviously, not everything I could have asked them, or wanted to ask them, but I thought it best to limit it to a couple of things, in hopes of getting a real answer, if I got any answer at all.

They did send a reply this morning, but it’s just another form-reply. It doesn’t actually address anything I said, and it repeats the same old shit.

Here it is:

Thank you for writing in about the SPLC’s report, “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”

We understand that not everyone in this report is equal in their rhetoric and positions on Islam. However, its purpose was to point out that many people who regularly appear on television news shows as Islamic experts routinely espouse a wide range of falsehoods that depict Muslims as intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms or prone to support terrorism.

Already, in the first substantive paragraph, we can see that it’s just a canned response, not a response to what I asked. We can see that because they talk – as they do in the report itself – about American constitutional freedoms while pretending to defend their attack on Maajid Nawaz…who is not American.

Promulgating misinformation – whether intentional or not – pollutes democratic discourse, makes it more difficult for citizens to cast informed votes, and limits the ability to participate meaningfully in public debate.

When people use their public platform to make false claims, such as Muslims being responsible for “70% of the violence in the world today,” they give credence to fringe activists and politicians who are pushing extreme anti-Islam policies, such as banning all Muslims from immigrating to the United States. Remarks like these are not thoughtful criticisms of Islam — they are factually incorrect statements that some people will accept as fact and, as a result, have a distorted view of all Muslim people.

Again, generic and beside the point. Maajid doesn’t use his public platform to make false claims, so that justification has nothing to do with what I asked them.

We take your criticism seriously, and will take it under advisement when writing on this topic in the future.

No they don’t. If they did they would have responded to what I said rather than sending a generic response that just repeats some of the original bullshit.

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 and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists,” according to The Guardian.

They didn’t include the link to the Guardian article, so here it is: List sent to terror chief aligns peaceful Muslim groups with terrorist ideology, by Vikram Dodd, August 4, 2010. It’s a terrible article. Peak Guardian, as Helen Dale remarked to me this morning. It implies writhing horrors, but totally fails to demonstrate them.

It begins:

A secret list prepared for a top British security official accuses peaceful Muslim groups, politicians, a television channel and a Scotland Yard unit of sharing the ideology of terrorists.

That sets the tone. The implication is that peaceful Muslim groups can’t possibly share the ideology of terrorists, but of course that implication is nonsense. There are non-violent Islamists and violent Islamists. Of course there are. But the Guardian and the BBC spent years and decades either ignoring or failing to grasp that fact, which is why the BBC called in the Muslim Council of Britain for every single story it ever did about Islam in the UK, while ignoring the existence of Maryam Namazie and everyone like her.

More from the article:

The document sent to Farr is entitled “Preventing terrorism; where next for Britain?” It lists alleged extremist sympathisers, including the Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella group in Britain for Islamic organisations. It also claims that a Scotland Yard counter-terrorism squad called the Muslim Contact Unit is dominated by extremist ideology.

Now let’s remind ourselves of what Nick Cohen said about the Muslim Contact Unit:

I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website,  if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of  ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.

I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.

Did Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism’ if you please, know he was relying on the word of a stool pigeon? ‘I don’t know the details.’ Would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is after all meant to defend the Stephen Lawrences of the world, reconsider its condemnation of Nawaz? With the braggart self-confidence of a liberal Donald Trump, Potok was not about to let facts change his mind. ‘No,’ he replied.

So there it is – the SPLC trusts Bob Lambert but not Maajid Nawaz.

Back to the Guardian article:

Other groups include the Muslim Safety Forum, which works with the police to improve community relations, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and even the Islam Channel, which provides television programmes for Muslims on satellite.

Why “even”? How is it impossible that the Islam channel is Islamist?

The briefing document says: “The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.

“These are a selection of the various groups and institutions active in the UK which are broadly sympathetic to Islamism. Whilst only a small proportion will agree with al-Qaida’s tactics, many will agree with their overall goal of creating a single ‘Islamic state’ which would bring together all Muslims around the world under a single government and then impose on them a single interpretation of sharia as state law.”

The document adds that if local or central government engages with such groups “it risks empowering proponents of the ideology, if not the methodology, that is behind terrorism”.

Vikram Dodd wholly fails to explain how any of this is false or even unlikely.

Also listed in the document are the Muslim Association of Britain, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the Cordoba Foundation, and Muslim Welfare House, based in north London, which was instrumental in forcing the extremist cleric Abu Hamza out of the Finsbury Park mosque where he preached.

The Finsbury Park mosque, now under new management, is also declared extremist, as are Birmingham Central mosque and the East London mosque.

Politicians described as “Islamist backed” include Salma Yaqoob, who stood for the Respect party in Birmingham, and the former MP George Galloway.

And? And nothing. There’s nothing to demonstrate or even hint that any of it is wrong.

Peak Guardian indeed – and this is one of the SPLC’s sources for that hit report.

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 the topic at hand). The SPLC also cited a report from the Guardian alleging that the Quilliam Foundation sent a secret list to a top British security official that accused peaceful Muslims of sharing the ideology of terrorists. Quilliam disputes this.

So much sloppy in that paragraph. His Daily Mail piece was about the niqab, not “the veil.” Most people take “the veil” to mean the head-and-neck scarf, not the thing that covers the whole face apart from the eyes. The DM chose to call it “the veil” in the headline, but Maajid himself was very clear in the piece:

Any item of clothing that covers the face and makes it impossible to identify individuals is open to abuse. Like many, I look with increasing exasperation on the niqab – which covers the face – and the burka – the garment that covers the entire body. That said, I do not believe in a blanket ban on the niqab. But the quid pro quo  is that when everyone else in society is expected to identify themselves,  a Muslim woman wearing a niqab should not be exempted.

…

Yes, women should be free to cover their faces when walking down the street. But in our schools, hospitals, airports, banks and civil institutions, it is not unreasonable – nor contrary to the teachings of Islam – to expect women to show the one thing that allows the rest of us to identify them .  .  . namely their face.

And the part about that report in the Guardian – “alleging that the Quilliam Foundation sent a secret list to a top British security official that accused peaceful Muslims of sharing the ideology of terrorists” – no no no no. The report claimed that the ideology of peaceful Islamists – not Muslims, Islamists – is broadly the same as the ideology of violent Islamists. And that, of course, is true, by definition – Islamists share the broad Islamist ideology, while some reject violence and others embrace it. Many political movements have violent and non-violent wings. The distinction between Muslims and Islamists is crucial; it’s only by ignoring it that the SPLC can make its ludicrous and damaging allegations.

Yahoo really should have been more careful in that paragraph. But it goes on to be useful: it talked to Heidi Beirich yesterday, so it can give us more information on the SPLC’s thinking.

When contacted for comment, Heidi Beirich, a director of the Intelligence Project at the SPLC, told Yahoo News that Nawaz spread conspiracy theories about Muslims infiltrating places like Scotland Yard and television networks.

“That kind of talk is not what we want people to discuss when discussing Muslims. These are conspiracy theories and it’s dangerous to portray every Muslim essentially as an infiltrator,” she said in a Monday phone interview.

See? She’s doing it there. She’s ignoring the distinction between Muslims and Islamists and thus telling a stupid lie about Maajid.

Beirich said Nawaz’s rhetoric foments anti-Muslim hatred that encourages people to see Muslims not as individuals but as “part of some secretive, dangerous cabal.”

Bollocks. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maajid is a vocal, prominent example of a Muslim who is a strong proponent of human rights and liberal values. By his existence and his activism he encourages to see Muslims as people like him.

But the SPLC isn’t backing down. Yahoo News asked Beirich if she is sympathetic to the view of Nawaz as a liberal reformer who is trying to amplify moderate voices within the Muslim world.

“My problem with that is he’s muddying that image with these conspiracy theories, so it’s hard for me to believe that that is his goal when he’s doing these other things,” Beirich said. “He doesn’t sound much different from Pamela Geller or David Horowitz or some of these other people about how Muslims are infiltrating everywhere. So my suggestion would be, if that’s what he’s trying to do, then he should ditch the conspiracy theories.”

That is just fucking outrageous.

 

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 voices within the Muslim culture championing freedom and equality, and that some of those voices must challenge religious institutes. Because of these extremist beliefs I face the danger of consequences at the hands of the victims of my bigotry, ranging from execution to losing my livelihood to being ostracized by the society. Therefore I am sure that you forgive me for not lifting my hood. (Here I compared myself with the KKK for your pleasure).

I believe I am far worthier than Mr. Nawaz for the title of “anti-Muslim extremist”. I write for a blog called “On the Margin of Error” on the atheist channel of Patheos network, in which I have three aims: one is to criticize Islamic ideologies, traditions, and institutions. That is, by definition, extremist and bigoted. My second goal is to convince Westerners to support Iranian reformists within the regime and to encourage diplomacy with Iran. (I said I’m a bigot, not a competent one).

But the third reason is the most important: I try to narrate the story of an ex-Muslim. In the report it was said that Mr. Nawaz sharing a cartoon that Muslims consider blasphemous was one reason for being on the list, well, you know what is the ultimate blasphemy according to the Muslims? Apostasy! In fact, apostates are considered unclean by Muslims. That makes me much more extremist than Mr. Nawaz. In fact, Mr. Nawaz can easily rectify his extremist stance by drawing a moral equivalence between the cartoonist and those who want to behead him, but I, this living blasphemy in flesh and blood, can only rectify it by committing suicide.

Read the whole thing.

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 am sure you will have guessed, the fascism in question is not white but Islamic. And once that subject is raised all notions of universal human rights, and indeed basic moral and intellectual decency, are drowned in a sea of bad faith.

…

Quilliam and Nawaz support women’s rights and gay rights. They believe that there is no respectable reason why men and women with brown skins should not enjoy the same rights as men and women with white skins. They think they should try to stop young Muslims joining Islamic State, not just for the sake of the Yazidis they will take into sex slavery, or the civilians they will tyrannise and kill, but for the sake of the young Muslims themselves.

A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten,  and will use any smear to denigrate them. As my secularist friend Faisal Saeed Al Mutar observed, when he, Nawaz and hundreds of others step forward and try to liberalise Muslim communities from within, they are attacked, ‘for being not Muslim enough, not Arab enough, not Pakistani enough, not filled with enough revenge and enough hatred’.

It’s all about Different Standards for Different Communities.

I have no doubt, for instance, that Alabama’s Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would be appalled if white supremacists hacked to death writers on the New York Times for challenging racial prejudice, as Islamists hack Bangladeshi liberal writers to death for challenging theocratic prejudice.

It’s still not clear to me whether the people at the SPLC are too thick to see that, or too cynical to act on it.

Of course they could not leave alone Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became an atheist and denounced the faith of her childhood, and is hated by a section of the white left for doing what they do all the time. That Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards to protect her from Islamist assassins in no way restrained our Alabama witch finders.

But the name that has jumped out at everyone is the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz. The text underneath oozes malice. The SPLC tries to make out that Nawaz’s stag night makes him an extremist. It misrepresents the work of his Quilliam Foundation so thoroughly I no longer recognised the organisation I knew. All these tricks and non-sequiturs, just so it can turn a liberal Muslim anti-extremist, into a reactionary ‘anti-Muslim extremist’.

And why why why would they want to do that? Why do they not want to join forces with him instead of telling evil lies about him?

Then Nick’s reportorial background knowledge comes into play:

I asked the SPLC’s Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism,’ according to its website,  if he was Muslim himself. ‘No.’ Was he happy, then, branding a liberal Muslim ‘an anti-Muslim extremist?’ Well, Potok said, the head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit had accused Nawaz of  ‘demonising a whole range of groups that have made valuable contributions to counter-terrorism,’ and that was good enough for him.

I tried to explain that the then head of the Muslim Contact Unit was Bob Lambert, one of the most notorious agent provocateurs British policing has produced. He stole the identity of a dead boy and infiltrated left groups. Pretending to be one of them, he got an activist pregnant then vanished from his partner and child’s lives. He had a shadowy part in the ‘McLibel’ case, which led to two environmental activists being persecuted for years in the courts, and is under investigation for allegedly smearing the campaign for justice for the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that, when Lambert attacked Nawaz, he was trying to ingratiate himself with Islamists as he had tried to ingratiate himself with leftists.

I didn’t know all that. That’s highly relevant information. Couldn’t the SPLC have done a little due diligence before maligning Maajid?

Did Mark Potok, ‘one of the country’s leading experts on the world of extremism’ if you please, know he was relying on the word of a stool pigeon? ‘I don’t know the details.’ Would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is after all meant to defend the Stephen Lawrences of the world, reconsider its condemnation of Nawaz? With the braggart self-confidence of a liberal Donald Trump, Potok was not about to let facts change his mind. ‘No,’ he replied. Did Potok think he was putting Nawaz’s life in danger. ‘No.’

Oh god. That is infuriating. It is exactly like Trump, and it’s infuriating.

Sue the bastards.

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 with somehow being “anti-Muslim”. The regressive left is now in the business of issuing fatwas against Muslim reformers.

I don’t love the label “regressive left,” because it’s been seized on by people who aren’t left at all and apply it to everything that’s not reactionary, but in this case, it fits.

There are, he points out acerbically, plenty of people who want him dead.

Here in Europe, amid jihadist assassinations and mass terror attacks planned with military precision, we truly are in the thick of it. Meanwhile, from the comforts of sweet Alabama comes this edict that liberal Muslims working to throw open a conversation around reforming Islam today are somehow to be deemed “anti-Muslim extremists”.

It is, indeed, incredibly presumptuous, along with everything else. That’s something I didn’t dwell on enough when I posted about this, because I was too furious about the straight-up wrongness…but I did point out their parochialism in blathering about American constitutional norms in a piece calling Maajid anti-Muslim. The parochialism and presumption are closely connected.

Mind you, I’m over here in the comforts of sweet Seattle…but I’ve done enough research on the subject not to bumble around thinking Maajid is an “anti-Muslim extremist,” let alone call him that in a trumpeted report.

To be able to successfully do what I care deeply about — working toward the emancipation of my Muslim communities from the oppressive yoke of theocrats — it is crucial that reforming liberal Muslims like me are not smeared as “anti-Muslim”. After all, it is in the theocrats’ interests to have us labeled so. It is only they who argue that any internal criticism is but heresy. In a Muslim version of the Inquisition, the punishments meted out by these jihadists to Muslims they accuse of “heresy” are by now so well known that they require no introduction.

Another set that benefits from the smear that reforming liberal Muslims are “not Muslim enough” are the often xenophobic, sometimes racist, but always anti-Muslim, bigots. By advocating that every Muslim is a jihadist in waiting, and must be expelled from the West, these bigots suppport the very religious segregation that Islamist theocrats call for.

ISIS has called this “eliminating the gray zone”.  We reforming liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims who sit between Muslim and anti-Muslim bigots disrupt the narrative of both these extremes. It is no surprise then that as well as being attacked by Islamists, I have been labelled a closet Jihadist by people like Glenn Beck on Fox News, and on various other anti-Muslim online platforms. Imagine for a moment how besieged we reformers feel.

Glenn Beck types on the one hand and SPLC types on the other.

Anti-Muslim extremists often complain that there are no “moderate Muslims” challenging extremism. Then liberal reform Muslims and ex-Muslims stepped up to this challenge, only to be labelled as “anti-Muslim” extremists by those we had hoped were our allies, and who we now call the regressive-left. They are those who talk of progressive values: feminism, gay rights and free speech, and who criticise Christian fundamentalists within their own communities. A long time ago, we liberal reform Muslims had high hopes for this group. Just as they challenge the conservatives of their own “Bible belt” we thought they would support our challenge against our very own “Qur’an Belt”. How wrong we were.

Not wrong about all of us. I talk of progressive values: feminism, gay rights and free speech, and criticise Christian fundamentalists, and I support Muslims and ex-Muslims who talk of progressive values: feminism, gay rights and free speech, and criticise Muslim fundamentalists. So do most of my friends. There are a lot of us.

Too many on the left not only abandoned us, but took to openly attacking us for advocating these very same progressive values among our own — extremely socially conservative — communities. Ironically, my life epitomises every one of the grievances the regressive left pays lip service to when refusing to entertain rational conversation around Islam. I have faced violent neo-Nazi racist hammer and machete attacks. I am a jailed survivor of the War-on-Terror torture era in Egypt.

…

Anderson Cooper has said that mine is a “voice I urge you to hear”. 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl considers my story “absorbing” and my work “important”. Kate Allen, UK head of Amnesty International has said my life involves “a passionate advocacy of human rights” and that she “was moved beyond measure”. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron sought my advice regularly while in office. And against this assault by the Southern Poverty Law Center I have the support and acknowledgement of the UK’s only watchdog against anti-Muslim hate run by Muslims themselves, Tell Mama UK.

And despite all this, white non-Muslim self-appointed inquisitors at a civil liberties organisation somehow found it acceptable to list me as an “anti-Muslim Extremist”.

And they’re standing by it, too. I know many people who have written to them, and received replies saying they stand by it, and repeating the same stupid claims they made in the report.

I am no “anti-Muslim” extremist. I am not your enemy. What I do require is your patience. For it is due to precisely this concern of mine for universal human rights for Muslims, that I vehemently oppose Islamist extremism and call for liberal reform within our communities, for our communities. For we Muslims are the first victims of Islamists and Muslim fundamentalists.  I am no Muslim representative. I am no religious role model (yes, I had a bachelor’s party) but I am Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents in a Muslim family. I have a Muslim son. The “Muslim experience” of liberal, reforming and dissenting Muslim and ex-Muslim voices is every bit as valid, every bit as relevant, and every bit as authentic as anyone else that is touched by this debate. We exist. Allow us to speak. Stop erasing our experiences.

Right? How dare the SPLC basically say that Islamists are the only authentic Muslims? How dare they attack reformist Muslims for defending the same rights we white non-Muslims enjoy? How dare they?

If there was anything we liberals should have learnt from McCarthyism, it is that compiling lists of our political foes is a malevolent, nefarious, and incredibly dangerous thing to do. And this terrible tactic, of simplifying and reducing our political opponents to a rogue’s gallery of “bad guys,” is not solely the domain of the right. As the political horseshoe theory attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye highlights, if we travel far-left enough, we find the very same sneering, nasty and reckless bullying tactics used by the far-right. Denunciations of traitors, heresy and blasphemy are the last resort of diminutive, insecure power-craving fascists of all stripes. Compiling lists is their modus operandi.

True that.

This particular list also makes a major category error, as these white American leftists conflate genuine (according only to my own humble view) anti-Muslim bigots with academic, journalistic and intellectual critics of Islam—including beleaguered ex-Muslim voices like Ayan Hirsi Ali. Unlike Ayan, they have never had to suffer the quadruple discriminatory pressure of appearing Muslim, brown, female, and losing one’s faith. I call these the minority within Muslim minorities.

And setting aside my disdain for naming any individuals on lists, to include me alongside Pam Geller is patently absurd. Pam Geller furiously opposed the Park51 Manhattan mosque project. I supported it. Pam Geller supported the anti-Islam British protest group EDL. By facilitating the resignation of its founder Tommy Robinson, I helped to render it leaderless till it practically fizzled out. Pam Geller has “expressed skepticism” about the existence of Serbian concentration camps. I have repeatedly referred to the genocide in Bosnia as having been a primary factor in my own anger and radicalisation as a youth. Pam Geller has called for Islam itself to be designated a “political system”, and to lose its constitutional rights as merely a religion. I am a Muslim who set up an organisation that campaigns to maintain a separation between Islam, and the theocratic Islamists who seek to hijack my religion. Need I go on?

…

And so I say to the Southern Poverty Law Center: You were supposed to stand up for us, not intimidate us. Just imagine how ex-Muslim Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali must feel to be included in your list of ‘anti-Muslim’ extremists. Her friend Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. And back then there was another list pinned to Theo’s corpse with a knife at that time: it too named Ayaan Hirsi Ali.