One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is its role in spreading hate, racism and religious intolerance. Hate groups have been quick to jump onto a technology that allows them instant worldwide communication, virtual anonymity and easy access to the minds of young people.
To highlight the dangers, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center produces a CD-ROM each year exposing the worst of the latest crop of hate sites. Many of them are now using video games and identity theft to try to make their views more persuasive and credible.
According to Leo Adler, Toronto lawyer and director of national affairs for Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, many of the worst games copy popular characters such as Super Mario and Sylvester Stallone, turning them into vehicles for hate.
“One of these sites alone has sales of over $1 million a year from its books, computer games and music,” says Adler.
They also make use of all the latest technologies. One site offers Adobe PDF files of racist leaflets that you can customize, print on your own computer and distribute. There’s even streaming video and White Power Radio.
Identity theft is a favorite tactic of hate groups. One has appropriated the Microsoft logo and morphed it into a swastika.
Another purports to be an historical website about Dr. Martin Luther King, and has registered the credible-sounding address martinlutherking.org.
It started out as a virtual copy of the King Family Foundation’s site. Now, it contains vicious anti-King polemics. Sadly, this site comes up in the top 10 if you do a Google search on the phrase “Martin Luther King.”
So it’s easy to picture a schoolchild going to the site and learning that King was “a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.”
The organizers of this website are well aware of its potential to sway young minds. They note that “this is the time of year many students are asked to write reports about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement” and so they supply convenient four-to- a-page flyers for students to scatter around their schools, directing their peers to the website to obtain “A True Historical Examination” of Dr. King’s life.
In the United States, such activities are protected under the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Canada has laws banning hate speech, but of course the Internet knows no boundaries. According to the Wiesenthal Center’s report, “the Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team is a site whose content appears to contravene Canadian anti-hate laws. It is registered to a Canadian, yet resides on a United States server, beyond the reach of Canadian authorities.”
Adler says they do notify Internet service providers when they find this type of offensive content, and that most of the legitimate ones try to do something about it.
However, he says, “what these groups have done is started their own companies to host these sites, most of them free of charge. We do try to go after advertisers. For example, one site showed the Amazon.com logo, so we contacted them and they stopped advertising there.
"Amazon probably gave an advertising budget to somebody who was not too discriminating about where they placed the ads.”
Other hate sites have attempted to gain credibility by posting, without permission, links to the webpages of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International.
There are more and more hate sites popping up each year. Adler says the Wiesenthal Center’s experts decided to highlight just over 200 after a study of 3,300 websites, some of which enlist suicide bombers and promote terrorism.
While it appears to focus on White Power and anti-Jewish sites, Adler says pro-Israel groups that advocate hate are also monitored by the Wiesenthal Center.
He points out the apparent contradiction between White Power groups that embrace Arab terrorists as comrades in an anti-Jewish crusade, but also publish “end Muslim immigration to America” pleas.
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, caused the designers of this report to add an entirely new section on the role of technology in fostering terrorism.
This issue is perhaps best summed up in this quotation from Laurie King-Irani, allegedly posted in March, 2001, on the website of Electronic Intifada: “The Revolution will not be televised – but it will be web-based.”
The Wiesenthal Center report contains information on a game in which one of the options is flying a plane into the World Trade Center. There’s even a report of an Islamic calendar that was posted on a Yahoo discussion group, BEFORE Sept. 11, showing a jet hitting lower Manhattan.
There’s no question that the Internet is being used as a convenient communications tool by terrorists. Some have even raised the possibility that terrorists are using steganography, coded messages hidden inside innocent images.
Adler confirms that the Wiesenthal Center researchers have found evidence of hidden and encrypted messages, and that we are basically powerless to stop terrorists from passing them around online. What we can do is educate our citizens, particularly young people, about the fact that there are good and bad people on the Internet, and that some of the bad ones are very bad.
In response to the challenge that the Wiesenthal Center is just giving hate groups what they want, more publicity, Adler says it’s more important to get out the message that these techniques are being used.
The center is providing copies of the Digital Hate 2002 CD-ROM free to schools and law enforcement agencies, and sending out speakers to teach people how to tell truth from lies in cyberspace. They know it’s a never-ending battle, and that they’ll have to do it again next year. But you have to start somewhere.
Web watch: www.wiesenthal.com
