Topic: Horowitz
In a Dec. 3 FrontPageMag article, Don Feder attacks the Southern Poverty Law Center for attacking him in a Nov. 1 item noting Feder's appearance at a conference in Latvia run by a group called Watchmen on the Walls, which the SPLC calls "anti-gay." Feder never contradicts this assertion about Watchmen on the Walls -- which there is ample evidence to support -- instead claiming that "Most of the 2-day conference ('The War on Christians And The Values Voter in 2006') had nothing to do with homosexuality, but focused on attacks on Christians from the courts, Hollywood, the news media, etc."
One of the speeches Feder gave at the Latvian conference is essentially a "we need more white babies" speech; another attacks Hollywood for issuing "toxins far more lethal" than "chemical waste or nuclear waste," one of them being "[t]he normalization of homosexuality."
Feder then dishonestly attacks the SPLC's depiction of him. Feder writes:
As for my dangerous liaisons ("Feder is involved with several extremist groups"), SPLC noted that I'm a member of the advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform "an anti-immigrant group whose leader has compared immigrants to bacteria."
[...]
The "bacteria" stuff refers to a 1997 Knight-Ridder article on FAIR founder John Tanton. "Bacteria" was the way the author of the article characterized Tanton's views on immigration. Tanton himself never used the word.
In fact, here's what the March 17, 1997, Knight Ridder article said about Tanton:
He founded FAIR in 1979 after others in the zero-population movement declined to take on the hot topic. In his characteristically blunt manner, Tanton explained his obsession with immigration, likening the flood of humanity to America's shores over the past 400 years to a plate of bacteria in a medical lab.
"You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate," Tanton said. "It uses up the medium. And then maybe it crashes and dies."
Yet somehow, in Feder's eyes, Tanton didn't say the word "bacteria," so it's OK.
Feder is also a little shaky on the facts. He goes on to refer to "Arkansas' Fayetteville State University"; it's in North Carolina.
We've previously noted Feder's disingenuous attack on Mike Huckabee.