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The number of "hate groups" operating in America has jumped 48 percent since 2000 due to those groups' "exploitation" of the immigration debate, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a controversial civil rights organization that has monitored hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan for nearly 30 years.In the current issue of its quarterly magazine "Intelligence Report," the SPLC said on Monday that 2007 was "another year marked by staggering levels of racist hate in America."In response, a group calling for immigration reform accused the SPLC of a "reckless" attempt at manipulating both data and terminology "in a last-ditch attempt to stop the immigration debate."Entitled "The Year in Hate," the article by SPLC staffers David Holthouse and Mark Potok states that the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization's latest annual count of hate groups in America found 888 operating in 2007, up 5 percent from 844 the year before."Hate groups continue to successfully exploit the immigration debate to their advantage, even though the immigration issue has largely disappeared from the presidential debate," said Potok, who also serves as the magazine's editor. "The fact is that they've been aided and abetted by mainstream pundits and politicians who give these haters a platform for their propaganda," he added.While acknowledging "there were some signs that nativist hatred may be starting to abate" since last June, when the movement helped kill a comprehensive immigration reform bill that had been expected to pass, the authors claim: "You wouldn't know that by listening to the furious rants of many groups." "America is being destroyed from within by a modern version of Genghis Khan's army," said the Emigration Party of Nevada. The party's leader, Don Pauly, wants to send government "sniper teams" to the border to forcibly sterilize Mexican women after a first child, the authors noted. "You need to understand that we are at war right here in America" is the way another group, the Nebraska-based United Citizens of America, put it. "We are being invaded by a foreign country, and we are being betrayed from within. Our government, from top to bottom, is being controlled by global elites."The spread of that and other conspiracy theories, along with racist propaganda, are adding to the growth of several sectors in the "radical right," including neo-Nazi organizations, racist skinhead gangs or "crews," factions of the Ku Klux Klan and black separatist groups, the SPLC said.Promoting such theories, coupled with a history of ties to white supremacist groups and ideology, is what caused the SPLC to add what it called "a major anti-immigration group," the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to its list of hate groups last year, the authors wrote."FAIR has been taken seriously for years by both the media and Congress, but it shouldn't be," said Potok. "Its officials have repeatedly revealed an anti-Latino and anti-Catholic bias."No objective criteria
Also on Monday, FAIR issued a news release of its own, calling the SPLC report "misleading" and one of that organization's "most reckless charges to date. It is calculated to be inflammatory, tarnish the reputation of leading immigration reform groups and shut down meaningful public policy debate about immigration reform.""When examined responsibly, the FBI hate crime data show a dramatically different story than the one the SPLC portrays," the FAIR stated. "To suggest an artificially large increase in the raw number of hate crimes, the SPLC selects 2003 as its base year, one of the lowest years on record for hate crimes against Hispanics.""If one compares the number of hate crimes between 1995 (the earliest report available on the FBI's Web site) and 2006 (the most recent statistical year available), one would see that the number of hate crimes has increased only 17 percent," FAIR added.But the SPLC also failed to index the raw hate crime data with the population, the group noted. When one indexes a 17 percent increase in hate crimes against Hispanics with a 67 percent increase in the Hispanic population between 1995 and 2006, the rate of hate crimes against Hispanics has actually dropped by about 40 percent.Finally, the SPLC provides no clear definition of a "hate group" and offers no objective criteria to identify or classify such groups, FAIR said. "The SPLC appears to think that it can stick this label onto any organization it wishes" without being challenged, FAIR said."This is consistent with the SPLC's growing practice of making allegations with no factual basis, no criteria and, sadly, no one challenging their increasing habit of playing fast and loose with the facts," FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement. As Cybercast News Service previously reported, the SPLC two years ago accused Christian "hate groups" of conducting a "holy war" against homosexuals, though the leaders of several conservative groups said that being included in the report was "a badge of honor" for them.
As in the days of Noah...
