WaPo: GuideStar announced its decision to remove the labels last week, two days after being sent a complaint letter
signed by 41 people, largely representing conservative organizations,
including Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whom
the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “one of America’s most
notorious Islamophobes,” and Tim Wildmon of the American Family
Association, a group the SPLC says is staunchly anti-LGBT.

“The ‘hate group’ list is nothing more than a political weapon
targeting people it deems to be its political enemies,” the letter said.
“The list is ad hoc, partisan, and agenda-driven.”

Threats? None of our followers and members have ever killed
or plotted violence against anyone, but members of SPLC, the very group
whose defamation GuideStar cites, have killed and attempted to
assassinate any number of us.

Last week, a coalition of conservative groups and organizations working in defense of freedom submitted a letter calling
out America’s leading source of information on U.S. charities,
GuideStar, on its use flagrant use of the SPLC’s hate labels in smearing
conservative organizations.

Earlier this month, GuideStar, the world’s largest
source for information about charities, added a new feature to its
website: warning labels flagging would-be donors to nearly four dozen
nonprofits accused of spreading hate. The outcry was immediate and most
vehement from conservative groups, including Christians who said they’d
been targeted as hateful for opposing same-sex marriage.

The complaints prompted GuideStar to reverse its course. The company said it’s removing the labels “for the time being”
beginning Monday, in part because of concerns raised about their
objectivity but also because of the threats against employees.

Letter: 2017.06.21_vfinal_signatures_LTR_Coalition to Guidestar-Harold Jacobs

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals,
write to express our strong disagreement with Guidestar’s newly
implemented policy that labels 46 American organizations as “hate
groups.” Your designations are based on determinations made by the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hard-left activist organization.
As such, SPLC’s aggressive political agenda pervades the construction of
its “hate group” listings.

The SPLC has no bona fides to make such determinations. It is not
a governmental organization using a rigorous criteria to create its
lists, and it is not a scientifically oriented organization. The SPLC is
merely another “progressive” political organization. It gained
credibility attacking Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and skinheads – many of whom
were engaged in violence. The SPLC is now trying to export the same
tactics into areas of mainstream political discourse including debates
about immigration and sexual-identity politics.

The “hate group” list is nothing more than a political weapon
targeting people it deems to be its political enemies. The list is ad
hoc, partisan, and agenda-driven.1 The SPLC doesn’t even pretend to
identify groups on the political left that engage in “hate.” Mosques or
Islamist groups that promote radical speech inciting anti-Semitism and
actual violence are not listed by the SPLC even though many have been
publicly identified after terrorist attacks. Radical, violent leftist
environmentalists or speech suppressing thugs – like the rioting
“antifa” movement – receive no mention from the SPLC.

Despite its denials to the contrary, this highly refined method
of ostracism and dehumanization practiced by the SPLC isn’t just about
verbal debate – it can foreseeably lead to violence. The SPLC’s primary
goal is to achieve the political submission of its opponents, but its
practice of sustained demonization in one’s community – which is what a
“hate map” is all about – inflames passions of hatred and animus against
its targets……

Read the whole thing here.

We fought the lies and the smear. And we won.

back on

Earlier this month, GuideStar, the world’s largest source for
information about charities, added a new feature to its website: warning
labels flagging would-be donors to nearly four dozen nonprofits accused
of spreading hate.

The outcry was immediate and most vehement from conservative groups,
including Christians who said they’d been targeted as hateful for
opposing same-sex marriage.

The complaints prompted GuideStar to reverse its course. The company said it’s removing the labels “for the time being”
beginning Monday, in part because of concerns raised about their
objectivity but also because of the threats against employees.

“Dismayingly, a significant amount of the feedback we’ve received in
recent days has shifted from constructive criticism to harassment and
threats directed at our staff and leadership,” said a statement
posted to GuideStar’s website on Friday. “With this development in mind
— driven by both our commitment to objectivity and our concerns for our
staff’s wellbeing,” the labels are being removed.

The “hate group” designations used by GuideStar came from the
Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit watchdog organization that tracks such groups,
which it says includes the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and white
nationalists. The “hate group” banners used on GuideStar’s website
linked to the law center’s website, according to the Associated Press.

The SPLC lists 52 “anti-LGBT”
organizations on its website, including several churches and nonprofit
Christian ministries, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, which it
says “has supported the criminalization of gay sex and currently is
working to enact so-called ‘bathroom bills’ around the country to
prevent trans people from using public restrooms … in accordance with
their gender identities.”

“These groups are not listed on the basis of opposition to same-sex
marriage or the belief that the Bible describes homosexual activity as
sinful,” the SPLC’s website said.

But some conservative organizations complained that the center’s
lumping them together with violent racist groups wasn’t based on
objective research but on a political agenda. GuideStar’s usage of the
center’s designation, they said, undermined the website’s policy of
“neutrality.”

“One may or may not like the legal advocacy of the Alliance Defending
Freedom, but they’re not a bunch of hooded-sheet Klanners burning
crosses,” wrote Mark Kellner for the conservative-leaning “Get Religion” website, which focuses focused on religion coverage in the news media.

GuideStar announced its decision to remove the labels last week, two days after being sent a complaint letter
signed by 41 people, largely representing conservative organizations,
including Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whom
the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “one of America’s most
notorious Islamophobes,” and Tim Wildmon of the American Family
Association, a group the SPLC says is staunchly anti-LGBT.

“The ‘hate group’ list is nothing more than a political weapon
targeting people it deems to be its political enemies,” the letter said.
“The list is ad hoc, partisan, and agenda-driven.”

The letter called the SPLC a “progressive political organization”
that had “gained credibility attacking Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and
skinheads — many of who were engaged in violence.” But now, the letter
stated, the center had expanded its “tactics” into debates about
immigration and “sexual-identity” politics.

The
letter also claimed the SPLC “has been linked to gunmen who carried out
two terrorist shootings” in the D.C. area, including a 2012 shooting at
the Family Research Council and the recent shooting of House Majority
Whip Steve Scalise at a baseball field in Alexandria.

In the first instance, the gunman said that he targeted Family
Research Council after seeing it was listed as “anti-gay” on Southern
Poverty Law Center’s website. In the second instance, the letter simply
stated the gunman “liked” the SPLC’s Facebook page.

The letter complained that the SPLC continued to “list” Scalise on
its website. A 2014 posting on the center’s website says Scalise gave a
speech to a “well-known group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis” years
ago in his home state of Louisiana. Scalise said he wasn’t aware of the
group’s views, a claim with which the SPLC took issue.

Conservative media outlets seized upon GuideStar’s warning labels and
the organization’s decision to remove them. A headline in the Daily Signal,
a news platform for the conservative Heritage Foundation, blared:
“Nonprofit tracker smears dozens of conservative organizations as ‘hate
groups.’” Breitbart News reported: “Institutional Left Loses Again: Nonprofit Tracker Withdraws Inaccurate Leftist-Driven Labels Hurting Conservative Groups.”

For its part, GuideStar said in its statement that designating “hate groups” is more complicated than it had realized when it first starting using the labels.

In the weeks and months since, we have
heard from both supporters and critics of this decision, many of whom
have presented reasonable disagreements with the way in which this
information was presented. We are always open and willing to have
conversations with our users and nonprofit groups and welcomed this
feedback. We acknowledge there is a deep, nuanced conversation to be had
with Americans of all political, cultural, and religious backgrounds
regarding how we address — and identify — hate groups.

GuideStar said it will continue to make the “hate groups” information available “on request.”

Family Research Council (who was the victim of a shooting by an SPLC member) said this:

1. The SPLC is a partisan, hard-Left profit-machine trafficking in labels that lead to violence.
2. GuideStar was right to disassociate from them, and joins the good
   company of the FBI and the Army (under Sec. McHugh), who’ve done the
   same. This establishes GuideStar as a truly neutral source for
   non-profit data.
3. We disavow and condemn violence in any form, and encourage GuideStar to report any threats of violence to the authorities.
4. We will continue to monitor “neutral” charity sites for expressions of partisan politics.

Haaretz has this:

Pamela
Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative
(AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American
Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the
Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.