Philly Post Questions Local “Hate Groups”

What Hate Groups Say About Being Called Hate Groups

We asked five Philly-area organizations.

By Victor Fiorillo | Philly Post | 4/18/2013

The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a database of organizations it designates as “hate groups.” To make the list, your group must “have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2013/04/18/philadelphia-hate-groups-skinheads

The SPLC identifies 1,007 active hate groups, and you’d probably think that places like Alabama, Arkansas and South Carolina would have far more such organizations than Pennsylvania, right? Nope. According to the SPLC, Pennsylvania boasts 35 active hate groups while those southern states have 30, 23 and 21, respectively.

I reached out to some of the Philadelphia-area organizations on the list to see how they feel about being called hate groups.

The Creativity Alliance
SPLC Designation: Neo-Nazi

Background: The Creativity Alliance is a legally recognized “religion for white people.” According to the organization’s website, “We promote White Civil Rights, White Self-Determination, and White Liberation via 100% legal activism. We do not promote, tolerate nor incite illegal activity.” Members are known as Creators, although detractors have referred to them as Creatards. A Philadelphia chapter was active as early as 2010.

Response: “Despite claims to the contrary, the Creativity Alliance … is not a hate-group,” church leader Reverend Cailen Cambeul emailed me. “We are a religious group centered around a common love for our own people – White people. And indeed, there are many other groups – particularly non White groups who believe as we do concerning their own people.”

“However, because of their legally protected standing in the community deriving from their so-called minority status, it is not considered politically correct to call them a hate group. In fact, to refer to such groups as ‘hate-groups’ is itself often treated as sufficient reason for persecution via the well ingrained system of institutional anti-White racism, i.e. hate-crime laws.”

“True hate-groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center choose to define themselves based on who and what it is they hate… Any claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center and people of that ilk are promoting tolerance and understanding is undermined by their hatred for people who simply are not like them.”

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