Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim activist who spent his teens and early twenties professing radical Islamist ideology before reforming, intends to sue the SPLC for defamation of character. The organization recently branded Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist,” for reasons that even sympathetic media outlets have found puzzling. By all appearances, Nawaz is a serious political thinker whose ideas have found cross-partisan support in the United Kingdom.

or years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has enjoyed respect and deference in American political culture, with its list of “hate groups” frequently invoked as authoritative. All people of good faith, on the right and the left, should lament these facts. The SPLC’s hyper-partisanship is bad enough. Far worse is its dilution of the word “hate” to denote any worldview that is not in step with a specific kind of ideological orthodoxy. The good news? People are beginning to notice.

Maajid Nawaz has noticed. Nawaz, a British Muslim activist who spent his teens and early twenties professing radical Islamist ideology before reforming, intends to sue the SPLC for defamation of character. The organization recently branded Nawaz an “anti-Muslim extremist,” for reasons that even sympathetic media outlets have found puzzling. By all appearances, Nawaz is a serious political thinker whose ideas have found cross-partisan support in the United Kingdom.

Why does the SPLC conclude that Nawaz is a hateful bigot? Its explanation is incoherent and petty, even by SPLC standards. The SPLC includes in its incriminatory “In Their Own Words” section the following notation: “According to a Jan. 24, 2014, report in The Guardian, Nawaz tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad—despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad. He said that he wanted ‘to carve out a space to be heard without constantly fearing the blasphemy charge.’” This is a truly bizarre indictment. As The Atlantic’s David Graham observes, the SPLC appears to be taking a theological position on the issue of cartoons and blasphemy, and then condemning Nawaz as a bigot based on his opposition to that position.

The SPLC’s willingness to designate itself an arbiter of correct Islamic theology would be amusing if it weren’t so destructive.

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