The southern poverty law center doesn't see much need to start tracking the occupy wall street movement even after some members were involved in a plot to blow up an Ohio bridge...
http://www.nationalreview.com/corne...southern-poverty-law-center-charles-c-w-cooke#
http://www.nationalreview.com/corne...southern-poverty-law-center-charles-c-w-cooke#
In light of the May Day arrests of the Cuyahoga 5, the Occupy Wall Street–affiliated group of men who planned to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio, I called the Southern Poverty Law Center to find out of they had any plans to start tracking the Occupy movement. The first person I spoke to was so shocked by the question that she paused for a good 15 seconds before promising to put me in touch with a representative. This she eventually did, however, and after a game of cat-and-mouse — the person she’d found for me was busy “hosting an international conference on right-wing extremism,” natch — we managed to touch base and I to pose the question: “Do you have any plans to start tracking Occupy Wall Street after a hate group tried to blow up a bridge?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said.
I met this with silence, so he said that, really, the SPLC only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology. “Isn’t that exactly what happened in Cleveland?” I asked. “These five men, all linked with Occupy Wall Street, attempted to blow up a bridge as an overture to the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the name of anarchism. They also looked to blow up the Republican convention.”
“They were anarchists,” he repeated.
“Yes?”
He paused. “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”
This was at least honest. He must have heard me thinking, because he continued, “Some people ask why we don’t cover prison gangs or the Crips and the Bloods, because they are violent, too. But they aren’t political, you see.”
“But Occupy is political,” I suggested.
Back to the honesty: “Well, take it if you will, or won’t.”
“Fair enough.”
He felt the need to keep explaining, so I let him. We only ever cover left-wing groups when they have a right-wing component, he told me. For example, “when anarchist groups are infiltrated by those on the right; Neo-Nazis, that sort of thing.”