HATE. It's all around us. Some Arabs hate the Jews and some Jews hate Arabs. Protestants hate Catholics and Croats hate Serbs. And this hatred is spilling over on to the Internet.
Sure, everyone who uses the Net for more than sending short messages to friends around the world has come across Web sites, news postings and E-mail spams which offend them because of the messages of hate they contain. But they seem few and far between. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case.
In the current issue (November 10-21) of Web Review - an on-line publication - the increasing use of the Internet by hate groups, primarily in North America, is reviewed in detail. From The Aryan Crusader's Library to Zundelsite - which expounds on the views of infamous Canadian Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel - the Internet is inundated with messages of hate.
Racial vitriol has prompted US lawmakers to propose restrictions on free speech on the Net.
The reality is, as the associate dean of the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Los Angeles points out in the article in Web Review, the whole idea of a free marketplace of ideas is flawed because mediums such as the Internet 'can give the erroneous impression that all information is of the same value'.
It seems that what he says is true. Where else, but on the Web, can a white supremacist get away with saying that he's proud of maintaining a Web site devoted to creating a 'whiter nation'? 'Maintaining the Aryan Crusader's Library may or may not make our country a Whiter place,' he says in a quote on the Web site, 'but it helps me feel like I'm doing something to help.' These views are not isolated, either. From Christian sites condemning interracial marriage to reflections by former contender for the Republican presidential nomination David Duke about 'torrential immigration of non-Whites' into the US, hate groups appear to be increasingly keen to use the Internet.
Not only do they find that it is an efficient way for one person or group to reach a wide audience, but I would guess that producers of these Web sites get little direct negative reactions to what they have to publish.