Re: When they came for the Jews...

[Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>]

	The Wiesenthal center is very influential in Jewish circles.
Attacking them directly would probably be a bad idea, and create bad
associations for anonymity amongst Jews.  (I'll come back to this.)

	As always, the best answer to bad speech is more speech.  Ken
McVay, and his Nizkor project, (http://nizkor.almanac.bc.ca) have been
involved in fighting hate speech, holocaust revisionism, and the like
for long time through archiving the big lies that revisionists pump
out, documenting the bogosity of their footnotes, showing their
contradictions, etc.  Pointing out this, and other net resources
fighting anti-semitism is a much cleaner approach than attacking the
Wiesenthal center.

	Someone noted the police stopping skinheads in Oregon-- I'll
point out that there is a substantial difference between talking and
randomly beating the crap out of people.  The later is a fair basis
for action by police, although we may choose to question their
methodology.  There is also a difference between stopping skinheads
and stopping blacks, in that the skinheads decided to wear clothing
and tattoos that identify them as skinheads, and thus may more fairly
be asked to bear the consequences.

	Another approach might be to talk about the concept of
identity, and how dangerous mandating identity cards and papers can
be.  Jews in Germany were tracked down via phone records, bank
records, membership lists of organizations (a lesson probably noted by
the NAACP in refusing to give Alabama its membership rolls, leading to
a supreme court case upholding the right of anonymous association.)

	At the last CFP, Hugh Daniels was distributing buttons with a
bar code on the that said things like 'Is your Jew bit set?' and 'Is
your gay bit set?'

	Proposals to require everyone to have ID are a slippery slope
leading to a police state.  Jews of all people should know better.

sameer wrote:
| 
| 
| 	Is there some way I can get a copy of this letter? Is it
| directed at specific ISPs or ISPs in general? An open response,
| publicized, to this sounds like something I could do. Publicity is
| fun.

| > Citing ``the rapidly expanding presence of organized hate groups on the
| > Internet,'' a leading Jewish human rights group [the Simon Wiesenthal
| > Center] on Tuesday began sending letters to hundreds of Internet access
| > providers and universities asking them to refuse to carry messages that
| > ``promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence.'' 


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume