Deadly Purpose behind "Antisemitism" Slur Exposed

SPLC demonstrates the lethal subterfuge at the root of the campaign against antisemitism

(This is a shortened and polished version of a post from Odysseus Unsheathed’s second month that makes an often overlooked but crucial point about antisemitism.)

The Martin Luther King assassination was still fresh in the public mind in 1971 when a new civil rights organization was founded by three white men in Montgomery, Alabama, the city in which Martin Luther King had his first church and where he led the famous Montgomery bus boycott. The name the three men chose for their new organization was “Southern Poverty Law Center,” an undeniably awkward-sounding name by anyone’s reckoning. But it produced a hell of an acronym.

SPLC was an acronym that not only sounded exceedingly familiar to 1971 Americans, it came with a boatload of moral authority and the built-in good will of the vast majority of us. For years, the news had been full of stories about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), sometimes called the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference (SBLC),¹ which was the organization founded by Martin Luther King and another Southern Baptist minister named Ralph Abernathy. Martin Luther King was the head of the SCLC when he was assassinated in 1968. Ralph Abernathy took over the SCLC upon Martin Luther King’s death and was still its leader when the SPLC, with a Montgomery, Alabama mailing address, was founded three years later and slipped into the mix.

So you had all these civil rights organizations seeking donations from the general public and all these acronyms and was it the SPLC’s fault if people got confused and sent their money to the SPLC when they thought they were sending it to Martin Luther King’s—now Ralph Abernathy’s—group, the SBLC, now SCLC?

One of the three white men who founded the SPLC was named Morris Dees, who had already made a bundle in direct marketing. Dees was so good at junk mail—at getting complete strangers to put their own money into envelopes and mail it to him—that he is in the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame. A low kind of genius with the soul of a cat turd.

The second white guy was a lawyer named Joe Levin.

On its website, the SPLC claims the third man associated with its founding was a well-known black civil rights figure named Julian Bond. On the Alabama Secretary of State’s website, however, the SPLC’s incorporating documents list the founders as Levin, Dees, and a young law student named Charles Abernathy. Yes, Abernathy.² The young law student then disappears from the picture.

It is safe to say the SPLC was a grift from the get-go and an especially odious one at that—cashing in on the trials and tribulations of the black Americans it claimed to be championing while siphoning off for its own enrichment millions of dollars sent by well-meaning Americans and meant for black civil rights organizations.

Over the decades, the SPLC shifted its grift from black civil rights to “fighting hate” and the money just kept rolling in. By 2018, the tax-exempt non-profit had a half billion dollars in assets—half of it off-shore.

A half billion dollars from “fighting hate?” How does that even work? Hate is a human emotion. It is part of being human. One can no more “fight hate” than one can “fight digestion.” So what does the SPLC mean when it says it is fighting hate? And why do people pay it so much money to do whatever it is it does?

If we stipulate that genocide is the highest expression of human hatred, then most people would probably say the worst outbreak of hate in human history was the Holocaust—the German Nazis’ genocide of six million European Jews in the mid-1940s. And, indeed, the SPLC pays a lot of attention to Holocaust hate. If you go onto the SPLC’s website and search the word “Nazi,” you will get 3,230 results [May, 2023].

Google Trends comparison of “Nazi” and “Bolshevik” as search terms on the Web in the US from 2004 to May, 2023.

But there was a much larger genocide that occurred just east of Germany, in Russia—a much more severe outbreak of human hatred. This was the Bolshevik genocide of 66 million Russian Christians that began 16 years before Hitler took power in Germany, actually intensified during WWII, and continued long after Germany surrendered. But even though the enormous outbreak of Bolshevik hate dwarfed the outbreak of Nazi hate, if you search the word “Bolshevik” on the SPLC website, you’ll get just 28 results. And most of those 28 are contained either in quotes by someone the SPLC is attacking or in denunciations of the “anti-Semitic canard” that the Bolshevik Revolution was Jewish.

It’s clear the SPLC isn’t “fighting hate” in any honest sense. If it were it would be at least as appalled at Bolshevik hate as it is at Nazi hate. But it isn’t. In fact, the SPLC gives the whole subject of Bolshevik hatred a wide berth. And it does its best to make sure everyone else does, too. If someone today wrote what appeared in the The American Hebrew on September 10, 1920 (before the horrors of what was going on inside Russia began leaking out), the SPLC would attack him as a liar, motivated by hatred of Jews:

That achievement [the Bolshevik Revolution], destined to figure in history as the over-shadowing result of the World War, was largely the outcome of Jewish thinking, of Jewish discontent, of Jewish effort to reconstruct . . . .

“What Jewish idealism and Jewish discontent have so powerfully contributed to accomplish in Russia, the same historic qualities of the Jewish mind and heart are tending to promote in other countries . . . .

Fascinating painting of Lenin addressing a crowd in Red Square on the eve of the Bolshevik takeover. Artist unknown.

I think the SPLC, itself, believes Bolshevism was Jewish. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t avoid the subject—or it would be neutral on the subject at least. In other words, I think the SPLC is a nest of straight up liars and holocaust deniers. But that isn’t exactly surprising. An organization that started as disreputably as the SPLC did is never going to be anything more than a dirty public fraud.

Heidi Beirich was, for many years, the editor of the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog and one of the most accomplished poison pens in the country. On September 24, 2020, I had the opportunity to depose her under oath.³ So I asked her what was the difference between Bolshevik hate and Nazi hate? How did she explain her organization’s relentless focus on the one hate while it completely ignored the other? She had no answer, of course, and finally said she couldn't answer because she didn't know Russian history.

So here you have a woman whose greatest skill is in destroying the reputations, careers, families, and lives of others, who has, in fact ruined many hundreds—maybe thousands—and who will seize on someone’s statement that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement and will use that statement without hesitation to destroy them with the smear of antisemitism. Yet she is too ignorant of Russian history to understand what it is about Bolshevik hate that makes it the kind of hate the SPLC doesn’t seem to mind.

Luckily, Florida is not the kind of place where people feign ignorance. In Florida, if you see there is a problem with people saying Bolshevism was a Jewish movement, you don’t let ignorance stand in the way of passing a law. You just make it antisemitic to blame Jews for what Jews do.

Don’t believe it’s that simple? Under paragraph (a) in Section (7) of Florida Statute 1000.05.,⁴

“Examples of anti-Semitism include:

3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real

   or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or

   group, the State of Israel, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.”

See? A law making it an act of antisemitic discrimination to blame Jews for what Jews do.

Many Americans, accustomed to being able to say what we think without fear of being locked in a cage, understandably feel confused by our new totalitarianism. The following practice slogans may help make things more clear.

Is it an act of anti-Semitic discrimination if you are handing out flyers and your flyer says: (yes or no?)

1. Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution.

2. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

3. In North America, whites owned slaves.

4. In North America, Jews dominated the slave trade.

5. Jews were the main victims in WWII.

6. Jews were the main victors in WWII.

7. George Soros.

If you answered “yes” to 1, 4, 6, and 7 you’ve got a solid grasp of the nuances of the issue and can probably visit Florida without risking a prison term.3

The widespread ignorance in the world of the role Jews played in the Russian catastrophe of the 20th Century is intentional. The history is being hidden. There are several possible reasons for this.

One possible reason might be to avoid a ferocious gentile backlash riding a world-wide wave of historical reckoning; no one—not even the Jews—controls which of yesterday’s impossibilities are tomorrow’s inevitabilities.

Another possible reason can be discovered by looking at the word “antisemitism” itself, which arose out of the Russian rabbinate and first appeared in the wider world in 1880.

The gentile view of the word “antisemitism” is a kind of dumb resentment. They grasp the built-in disadvantage of being subject to a deadly charge that may be leveled at anyone in the world except a Jew, and to be guilty of which requires nothing more than the accusation of such by any Jew. But they are unable to remove the disadvantage because they imagine antisemitism is real—a real and terrible thing. Most of them lack the independence of thought to be able to answer a charge of antisemitism with a shrug and a “So?”

But the idea of antisemitism—and the word that expresses it—was not created for the gentile. It was invented by the Russian rabbis for use in their struggle against their real enemy—assimilation. The idea of antisemitism was, first and foremost, intended for the Jews over whom the rabbis exercised control. Antisemitism was presented to Jews as a kind of mental illness that lies in various stages of latency in all gentiles. Unless the Jew remained captive in his shtetl, the rabbis told him, he would be at the mercy of the sudden and arbitrary waves of savage and irrational gentile hatred called “antisemitism.”

Antisemitism is a corralling myth. It rests on the twin falsehoods of perpetual Jewish victimhood and universal gentile wickedness. If the truth of the Jewish role in the enormous crimes committed against the Russians during the 20th Century became widely known and openly discussed, the antisemitism myth would disappear like smoke from a crematorium. The barrier between Jews and humanity would be removed and de-judaized Jews could join in the great story of mankind rather than bind themselves in eternal enmity to it.

But there is a third possible reason for keeping the Jewish role in Bolshevism hidden from us that makes our ignorance unacceptable. The purpose behind keeping the Jewish role in the slaughter of 66 million Russian gentiles hidden from us might be to render us incapable of recognizing the approach of the next genocide. This one seems unlikely until I look at this guy, then it seems certain. To the extent this is the reason, every accusation of antisemitism by the SPLC is the most hateful hate speech imaginable.

Or, perhaps, with the horror they inflicted on the Russians, the Jews have gotten genocide “out of their system.”

Gaza genocide (American Friends Committee)

Oh, wait.

When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:

And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: Deuteronomy 20

As long as there is Judaism, there will be genocide. “Antisemitism” is a contrivance to keep that truth hidden from us—to keep us, therefore, defenseless.

1. From an article about memorial observances for King in the January 12, 1972 New York Times: "Mr. Wyatt, a member of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Greater New York, a chief sponsor of the observances, urged citizens to take a day off from work “in memory of this great man,” or to forward a day's pay to the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference in Atlanta."

2. The last name Abernathy occurs only once in every 14,285 American families. That means there is a .007 percent chance the third incorporator’s name would be “Abernathy” by random chance and a 99.997 percent chance the SPLC was intentionally misleading the American public in order to profit by -the MLK assassination.

3. Excerpts from the deposition having to do with antisemitism are here.

4. Florida’s HB 741 2019 defined antisemitism and made religion a protected class. HB 269 2023 made it a third degree felony to publish political speech about which a member of a protected class claims to feel threatened, with hate crime enhancements providing for up to ten years in prison. Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to Israel to sign both bills.