Once a highly regarded American organization devoted to monitoring and combating neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has in recent years adopted an ever-broadening definition of what it considers bigotry. Its list of ostensible bigots includes such figures as the sociologist Charles Murray, the ethicist Christina Hoff Sommers, and the former presidential candidate Ben Carson. After it labeled Quilliam, a British organization dedicated to combating radical Islam, and its founder, Maajid Nawaz, as “anti-Muslim extremists,” Nawaz retained a team of libel lawyers. The SPLC recently settled, paying him $3.375 million and apologizing. Douglas Murray comments:

While many in the West seem to think the current fighting in Israel is about housing policy, or human rights, or the selective blockade of the Gaza Strip, the rhetoric of Palestinian leaders and on Palestinian social media makes clear that it is in fact about al-Aqsa mosque. This should come as no surprise: fabricated claims that “al-Aqsa is in danger” have been used to provoke anti-Jewish violence for a hundred years. In this particular case, explains Haviv Rettig Gur, both Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party exploited the claim in their rivalry for Palestinian hearts and minds: