nazi's, jews, and why you don't get to hear about them

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Internet providers asked to censor racist groups
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Copyright 1996 Nando.net
Copyright 1996 The Associated Press

BOSTON (Jan 10, 1996 09:34 a.m. EST) -- White supremacist groups that once
spread their racist messages at rallies and in leaflets are now going
high-tech on the Internet -- a trend a leading Jewish human rights group
wants to stop.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Tuesday began sending hundreds of letters to
Internet access providers asking them to refuse to carry messages that
"promote racism, anti-Semitism, mayhem and violence."

Good idea? No, say providers and civil libertarians. They argue that public
debate is the way to defeat hate.

The Internet allows users to "show the whole world what's wrong wrong about
what the hate speakers are saying," said Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group dealing with
computer communications.

"The correct place to try and put pressure is on the people who create the
content, not the person who provides access to it," said CompuServe
spokesman William Giles.

The roughly 250 hate groups in the United States, whose previous methods
reached a limited audience, now "have a magnificent marketing technology
dumped in their laps," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the
Wiesenthal center, based in Los Angeles. "They are able to dress up their
message in a way that looks ... presentable."

Slick web sites are springing up every day, with names such as Aryan
Nations, Skinheads U.S.A. and The Aryan Crusader's Library.

Ernst Zundel, a prominent Canadian Holocaust revisionist who has a homepage
called Zundelsite, says he should have as much of a right to post a web page
as anyone else.

"The Internet is the first and last truly free marketplace of ideas, for the
time being. It levels the playing field," Zundel said. "To curtail the
freedom for some will curtail the freedom for all."

The Wiesenthal Center's request is part of a growing debate over whether
Internet service providers should be viewed as publishers responsible for
what moves on their networks, or carriers who simply provide access to a
service without monitoring what is communicated.

The Wiesenthal Center argues that the services are publishers who have a
civic responsibility not to promote bigotry.

Godwin says Internet service providers should be treated like bookstores,
which exercise some control when they decide to specialize in science
fiction instead of mysteries, but are not expected to read every book and be
held responsible for the books' contents.

Prodigy spokesman Brian Ek said the service does employ systems operators
who monitor content on its proprietary bulletin boards and can remove any
messages with "blatant expressions of bigotry, racism or hate."

But what exactly meets that definition is hard to pin down: "You make a
decision when you see it."

For example, when one subscriber pointed out a "repugnant" bulletin board
message saying the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews was a good thing,
Prodigy removed it

Joe Bunkley -- who operates the "1st WWW Banned Media Page," a web site that
links to virtually every other white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet site
-- had a strong message for those who would want to stop him from posting
his views.

"You cowards who want my page shut down can't deal with either the diversity
or the free interaction of ideas," he said.

"You, the intellectually dead, are hereby formally notified that my
intentions are not to offend anyone. It is to speak the truth as I know it
and to ensure, to the best of my abilities, the survival of the White Race."