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When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group.
Being declared a hate group wasn’t in my plans for the day, but like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don’t even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group.
My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the “group” part, and one man and a cat don’t seem to be enough. Even when the cat is a well known bigot who hates mice, birds, car alarms that go off in the middle of the night, the plumber and sudden noises.
Still the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed, “Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield” as one of their “Active Anti-Muslim Hate Groups,” alongside such other vast organizations as “Faith Freedom,” a website for ex-Muslims, and “Casa D’Ice Signs,” the signs on a bar located on K-Mart Plaza located in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Someone with less faith in the fact checking abilities of the Southern Poverty Law Center might have thought that whoever had made up this list had no clue that “Casa D’Ice” was a lounge with signs outside, that there was no such group as “Casa D’Ice Signs” and that signs are pieces of plastic and not a hate group. But I had faith that the Center knew more than I did. Perhaps its crack team of researchers had learned that the signs had come alive and formed their own hate group, somehow arranging their own letters to form messages about illegal immigration and the need to get out of Iraq.
My first thought was to wonder whether some mistake had been made in my own case, but the Southern Poverty Law Center people are experts on hate groups, even if they don’t seem to know what the definitions of “hate” or “groups” or “hate groups” might be. Even if they seem to have copied their list off a forum somewhere at the last minute to have something to show the donors. Clearly I was now a hate group, and with tax season upon us, I called my accountant to find out if there was a tax deduction for that. There wasn’t.
As a consolation though, I was listed as “active,” which I took as a compliment because I had jogged a few miles yesterday and clearly the Southern Poverty Law Center had noticed. They also listed me as being in New York, which showed that the Center was well aware that it was aggressively trespassing above its jurisdiction below the Mason-Dixon Line and invading the north.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” (TM), which is either a map of hate groups or a map of groups that the center hates, had me floating somewhere in the East River next to the National Black Foot Soldier Network and the National Socialist Movement in Long Island. Say what you will, but I think it’s a real tribute to the broadminded diversity of the city that there’s room for all of us there, from Catholic Family News to the Nation of Islam to the newest massively organized hate group– me.
I had fewer members, especially if you don’t count the cat, and no uniforms or jackboots, but I had to soldier on. The Southern Poverty Law Center was in desperate need of more hate groups to fight and I couldn’t let them down. It’s not easy running a 216 million dollar organization which has been described as the country’s richest civil rights organization with misleading fundraising practices.
Having succeeded in such diverse areas as being George McGovern’s national finance director, Carter’s national finance director and national finance chairman for Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign, SPLC head honcho Morris Dees doesn’t have many options except to collect his 0.95 percent compensation and solicit more donations to fight active hate groups like me and that guy who puts up signs on his bar. I knew that I couldn’t let him down.
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