Category Archives: News

Fraud in Fact… or in Fiction?

One doesn’t expect an anti-racist organization to help finance white supremacist groups. But that is precisely what Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a public interest law firm that fights discrimination, stands accused of.

The accuser is the Department of Justice, which last week issued a surprising indictment of the SPLC, charging it with secretly funding hate groups, including affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.

According to the government, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid over $3,000,000 – laundered through bank accounts registered to fictitious entities – to people in those groups.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, further claimed that the SPLC had failed to comply with its non-profit status, saying they committed fraud against their donors by failing to disclose the payments.

“And in no fundraising efforts that the investigation found,” he noted, “did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’ So that’s fraud.”

Mr. Blanche, speaking alongside FBI Director Kash Patel at a news conference, said the organization made payments to at least eight people, including those affiliated with violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi organizations.

“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Mr. Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Mr. Patel said that the SPLC “used the money they raised from their donor network to actually pay the leadership of these very groups.”

Established in 1971 and based in Alabama, the SPLC, over many years, successfully battled the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups in courts, and helped reporters and law enforcement keep tabs on domestic extremists.

In recent years, though, the group widened its net, identifying arguably mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups, which it defines as having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people.”  Among the more recently SPLC-targeted groups are the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

In 2024, the SPLC said that TPUSA’s “primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants… and civil rights activists… [The group] is at the forefront of the movement to promote Christian nationalism, the theocratic worldview that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian country and that Christian values and beliefs should inform the government and wider culture…”

It notes that the late Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s executive director until his murder in 2025, said, “You cannot have liberty if you don’t have a Christian population.”

Whether TPUSA is a hate group or what most people would simply consider a conservative (okay, “ultra-conservative”) organization, the SPLC certainly alienated some Republican lawmakers – and President Trump.

During a December congressional hearing, House Republicans accused the group of “being partisan and profitable.” In October, Mr. Patel severed FBI ties with the SPLC, alleging that it “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.”

In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.” Needless to say, Mr. Trump was not pleased.

What, though, exactly, did the SPLC do to earn the administration’s charges?

It hired informants to infiltrate the targeted groups and convey back information about them and their plans. Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s chief executive, said that the group no longer used informants, but did so when extremist violence was common.

“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” he said.

There is nothing illegal about paying informants to spy on groups, something that government agencies like the FBI themselves have often done. Which fact has let the president’s critics to accuse him of vindictively targeting the SPLC with specious charges.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History,” Mr. Trump exulted on his social media platform, “has been charged with FRAUD.”

And, he added, somewhat incongruously, “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

© 2026 Ami Magazine

Pita and Propaganda

The Guardian lets down its guard

“First comes the hummus: studded with chickpeas, anointed with a little reservoir of olive oil, greedily smeared up with hunks of pitta [sic] bread and messy fingers. Then the tabbouleh, then some homemade falafels…”

Thus opened an article in The Guardian, the London daily that is considered Britain’s “paper of record,” like our country’s The New York Times. And, like The Times, it has a denied but evident bias against Israel and Jews.

The details of the sumptuous meal continued through several deliriously described courses and dessert (baklava and homemade chocolate, if you really must know). The writer, the paper’s sports writer and opinion columnist Jonathan Liew, was feasting at a successful North London Arab-run eatery called Cafe Metro.

He wasn’t writing a food column. It was, rather, a report on a controversy swirling around Cafe Metro and a new nearby branch of an popular upscale bakery called Gail’s.

The night before it was due to open, the bakery was vandalized with red paint. Less than a week later, all its windows were smashed in. Slogans reading “reject corporate Zionism” and various obscenities were scrawled on its walls.

Gail’s describes itself as “a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” but its parent company, Bain Capital, reportedly invests in military technology, including some Israeli security companies. Bad bakery!

Mr. Liew, after noting how Cafe Metro, “proudly blazons its Palestinian heritage” with a public display of flags, describes it lovingly as “a source of comfort and community in troubling times, resistance in its tastiest and most delicately spiced form.” And goes on to contend that “the very presence of [Gail’s] 20 metres away from a small independent cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.”

Gail’s, the writer seems to imply, has no business being a business.

Many people saw Mr. Liew’s description of the bakery’s opening, “an act of heavy-handed, high-street aggression” as, well, an act of heavy-handed Fleet Street aggression.

It was also an example of utterly corrupt journalism. Mr. Liew wasn’t quoting the Arab owners of Cafe Metro – who would be misguided enough to characterize Gail’s as an aggressor for simply existing. It was the columnist’s own ostensible statement of fact.

Making matters even more outrageous, the piece, which included no quotes from anyone connected to Gail’s, dismissed the window-smashing and paint smearing as “small acts of petty symbolism.”

A slew of complaints about the column was registered by, among many others, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who called the column “disgusting,” “appalling” and “ridiculous.”

With typical droll British humor. Senior Barrister Simon Myerson referenced the paper’s record of bias, writing: “I see the Guardian is having an antisemitic moment. Sorry, another antisemitic moment.”

The Guardian later edited the piece, “repositioning” the objectional “aggression” wordage “to clarify it meant to refer to the described fears about the chain’s impact on small traders.”

Also, “to avoid misunderstanding,” the paper removed the “small acts of petty symbolism” phrase, which, it explained, “was not intended to minimize local vandalism but rather to suggest its misdirected futility.”

All of which really misses the real point. It was the framing of the entire piece that was, and remains, journalistically objectionable.

After hundreds of words extolling the gustatory delights of Arab cuisine, Mr. Liew dwells for hundreds more on how the family of one of Cafe Metro’s operators “once lived in the city of Beit Hanoun in Gaza, and now lives out a precarious and hunted existence in one of Gaza’s many temporary refugee camps…”

And he contrasts that with how “Gail’s has long been feted as a purveyor of luxury baked goods and is an unmistakable barometer of local affluence.” Even though the chain is not currently owned by Jews or Israelis, the insinuation is as obvious as it is odious.

And Mr. Liew concludes with the observation that the two businesses “have found themselves on the frontline of a war. A deeply asymmetric war, defined by gross imbalances in power and resources and platforms.”

There is in fact a gross imbalance here. It lies in the shameless portrayal of a vandalized victim as an aggressor, opposite a reverent, adulatory portrayal of an imagined victim.

(c) 2026 Ami Magazine

Letter Bomb

Just over a year ago, President Trump nominated Joe Kent, a former Army Special Forces soldier and two-time Republican candidate for Congress, to be director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). It was a decision the president has come to regret.

Although Mr. Kent was a Trump loyalist, even to the point of endorsing the discredited “stolen election” of 2020 claim and asserting that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an FBI plot, he turned his back on Mr. Trump last week, resigning his position in protest of the current Iran war.

The content of his resignation letter should concern us all.

Mr. Kent is entitled to believe, as he wrote, that the current war was not warranted because there was no “imminent threat” to the U.S. that would permit an American president to order to attack another country.

It’s a risible stance, considering Iran’s “Death to America” drumbeat and accelerated ballistic missile and nuclear programs – not to mention the mullahs’ employment of proxies over years to kill American citizens. But people are entitled to be short-sighted, even myopic, even stupid.

The gist of Mr. Kent’s letter, however, was not an insistence on Congressional approval or some pacifist plea. It was contemporary blood libel. And aimed at such slanders’ perennial targets.

The former security official lays responsibility for what he considers an illegitimate war squarely at the feet of Israel and her American supporters. It was they, he asserted, who forced a helpless, impressionable President Trump to attack Iran. “It is clear,” he wrote, “that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

He blames the Iraq war, too, on Israel, which “cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”

That Mr. Trump might be vulnerable to outside pressure is a laughable notion. If there is anything that both supporters and detractors of the president agree upon, it’s that the man has a mind of his own and is about as pliable as a steel rod.

But Mr. Kent seems to harbor an unshakeable belief in the Jewish ability to… control things, including the president.

Mr. Netanyahu certainly made the case to Mr. Trump that Iran is an imminent threat not only to Israel, its “Little Satan,” but also to the U.S., its “Great Satan.” But Mr. Trump has regarded Iran as a threat for decades. Well before he first became president, he actually called for troop deployments to the country and seizure of control of Iranian oil. In 2018, he famously withdrew from the Obama-era JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran.

Sharing an interest with Israel – and acting in unison with her to head off the mullahs’ desire to Islamify the world – isn’t some dark conspiracy. It’s responsible leadership.

What’s more, Israeli leaders have lobbied every president in memory to go to war in Iran. That Mr. Trump decided to do so is not a sign of some gullibility but of his judgment that the time had come to remove a threat to the Western world.

Mr. Kent should never have been in a governmental position, much less a counterterrorism post. That should have been evident from the start. The evidence would have included his 2021 call to the odious white nationalist Nick Fuentes to get advice on social media strategy for a Congressional run. And his interview by neo-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold. And his hiring of a member of the neo-fascist “Proud Boys” as a campaign consultant.

And then there’s the large tattoo on his arm, revealed in a relative’s innocent posting of him in a swimming pool, that reads: “Panzer.” The name, of course, of a famed Nazi tank.

Now, since his resignation, he has appeared on Jew-baiting Tucker Carlson’s podcast and has been lauded by the likes of Candace Owens, a reincarnation of rabid antisemite Charles Coughlin. “May American troops take [Kent’s] lead,” she posted on social media, “and look into conscientious objection to Bibi’s Red Heifer War. Goyim stand down.”

Birds of a feather…

While we can feel relief that Mr. Kent has left the NCTC, it’s deeply concerning that he was ever part of it. One has to wonder if other bigots may be lurking in government bodies.

(c) 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran