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Philly Inquirer: More old, conterfactual "Hate on the Net" "news"
This is fucking amazing. In the last month, the two most well-known young
neo-Nazi activists on the net, having been exposed to a true diversity of
opinion and true free speech on the Internet, repudiated their former
beliefs (I'm buying one of them a beer next week); the most well-known
neo-Nazi propagandist on the net, frustrated by having her daily newsletter
posted publicly to Usenet, lashes out at DejaNews for building a case
against her (she knows her own words are her best refutation); and serious
attempts by neo-Nazis to rmgroup and vertical-spam two newsgroups where
neo-Nazi movements are discussed and refuted failed without a single
spam-cancel or account closure that could be mischaracterized as
"censorship."
And yet Reid comes out with the old Horsemen fear-mongering about "Hate on
the Net." He even quotes an old piece from *former* net.nazi Milton Kleim
WHICH MILTON NO LONGER SUPPORTS.
The Dreaded Nazi Threat to the Net is in disarray, and the totally
discredited and impotent kook Don Black (the man who would be king of the
island of Dominica, but his coup failed) gets a front-page story in the
Philadelphia Inqirer to sneer at America on July 4th. Unbelievable. No
wonder Don was happy to send the full text of the article, below, to his
ever-shrinking pool of supporters (and others) on his Stormfront mailing
list (send "archive stormfront-l" in the body of a message to
[email protected] if you'd like to browse the last 100 messages, half
of which talk about the recent breakdown in "the movement").
It seems they're determined to beat on the Four Horsemen even when
it's patently obvious that they're dead.
Reid Kanaley's email address is [email protected], but it seems he's
only interested in talking to "experts" who are way, way out of touch with
current events.
-rich
censor internet now! http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/potw2/
boycott fadetoblack! http://www.fadetoblack.com/prquest.htm
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 11:13:53 GMT
From: "don.black" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: SF: More "Hate on the Net" news
>From this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer
<http://www2.phillynews.com/inquirer/96/Jul/04/front_page/HATE04.htm>...
Happy Independence Day! --Don
Page One
Thursday, July 4, 1996
Hate groups reaching vast Internet audience
They are reaching a vast audience. Some Web sites are ``very, very slick
says an observer.
By Reid Kanaley
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Don Black, who was once national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan and now runs a site on the World Wide Web called Stormfront,
recognized early that the Internet was the place to be.
``The potential of the Net for organizations and for movements such as
ours is enormous,'' Black, 42, of West Palm Beach, Fla., said in an
interview. ``We're reaching tens of thousands of people who never before
have had access to our point of view.''
Those who monitor the activities of extremists such as right-wing
militias, neo-Nazis, Holocaust-denial groups and others agree that the
Internet is proving irresistible to those organizations for
communication, propaganda and recruitment.
In a written response to an interview request e-mailed to Minuteman
Press Online, a militia-oriented Web site, someone identified as R.A.
Mann declined to be interviewed yesterday, but added:
``Militias use the Internet in the same way other groups do: data
verification, urgent updates, tips on everything, legislation overviews,
etc.''
Begun in the late 1980s as an electronic bulletin board for the
so-called ``white nationalist'' movement, Stormfront was moved by Black
to the Web in March 1995. The site is decorated with German-gothic text,
white-pride graphics, and letters urging African Americans to thank
whites for slavery.
``At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing [ in April 1995 ] , maybe two
or three racist groups had Web pages,'' said Rick Eaton, senior
researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. ``There are
now dozens, if not over 100 outright racist Web pages. There's a lot of
new players that we never saw before, and most importantly there is a
sense of communication and instant gratification -- that they're not
alone.''
And many of their online efforts amount to ``very sophisticated
advertisements for their groups,'' said Paul V. Fleming, a mass
communications graduate student at Oklahoma State University, who has
co-authored a research paper on Internet hate speech. ``Some of these
sites are just very, very slick,'' with good graphics and downloadable
``hate music,'' Fleming said.
Several watchdog groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the
Wiesenthal Center, are attempting to closely monitor hate speech on the
Internet.
The Wiesenthal Center, Eaton said, now focuses up to 80 percent of its
research activity on the worldwide linkage of computer networks where
cheap, unfettered and often anonymous global discourse points up both
the blessings and curses of free speech.
Black said he oversees an e-mail discussion group with 380 subscribers
and an electronic mailing list for 1,200 people. But since March of 1995
he says his web site has been visited by thousands more.
``What we've done is begin to break that monopoly'' of the mainstream
media, said Black. ``Anyone, of course, can set up a Web page, and in
our case we've been pretty successful at it as far as the traffic we've
gotten.''
``Up to now, you had a guy like Don Black . . . sitting there and
basically playing at being a Nazi when the lights are out. Now all of a
sudden there is a double sense of empowerment: Their message,
theoretically, gets out to hundreds of thousands or millions of people .
. . and they're in touch with each other instantaneously,'' said Mark
Weitzman, director of the Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate.
Groups serious about using violence are not likely to be using the
relatively insecure Internet to communicate, several experts said. Eaton
said he had not previously heard the names of any of those arrested this
week as part of an alleged plot by the Viper Militia in Arizona to bomb
buildings in Phoenix.
Were the Vipers on the Internet? ``Nope, I can't find 'em,'' said
Richard Bash of Portland, Oregon, who maintains an electronic mailing
list for the academic discussion of terrorism, and is writing a doctoral
dissertation about militias.
Most extremist-group members are ``blowhards'' who migrated from such
innocuous activities as ``bowling leagues.'' Rarely, he said, do they
pose a threat to society.
Weitzman said, however, that increasing electronic communication among
these extremists could be inspiring more to violence. ``With the arrests
in Arizona, you see more people willing to go to the extreme,'' he said.
``As the communications increase between them, there is a sense: We have
this link, we can start doing something about society.''
He said impressionable young people are the propaganda targets of many
extremist groups. ``They see the Internet as an incredible recruiting
tool. It is wide open for kids and, essentially, the younger the better,
because they can get them before they develop all the intellectual
resources to combat what they're saying,'' Weitzman said.
``Organizations have recruited through Stormfront, and through their Web
pages that we've linked to,'' said Black.
Some experts say that the nature of the Internet makes it difficult to
stumble upon extremist material without looking for it. But Eaton
contests that.
He pointed out that a Web search for the term ``Talmud'' on the Infoseek
service turns up a page from Stormfront titled ``The Talmud: Judaism's
holiest book documented and exposed,'' in the top 10 of 353 references.
In another search, the first and third of 415 references found for the
word, ``Auschwitz,'' were links to the Web site of an organization that
denies the Holocaust took place.
And an online essay by white supremacist Milton Kleim Jr., 25, of
Roseville, Minn., urges a campaign by ``cyber guerrillas'' to
proselytize in the Internet discussion groups called Usenet news groups:
``Usenet offers enormous opportunity for the Aryan Resistance to
disseminate our message to the unaware and the ignorant . . . We MUST
move out beyond our present domain, and take up positions on
`mainstream' groups.''
In his paper titled ``An Examination of Hate Speech, Censorship and the
First Amendment on the Internet,'' presented in March to a Las Vegas
conference on American popular culture, Fleming and co-author Torey
Lightcap said, ``The Internet is accused of not only giving hate groups
an uncontrolled platform but also legitimizing them.''
But the paper concludes that ``like the non-electronic world, citizens
of cyberspace will probably have to live with hate speech as one of its
liabilities in order to enjoy the wide range of benefits the Internet
offers.''
Cyberspace libertarians severely criticized the Wiesenthal Center
earlier this year when it sent thousands of letters to Internet service
providers asking them to deny Web space to hate groups. Eaton said he
was disappointed that barely a score of providers responded.
``We would like to see providers say, `This stuff is crap, and we're not
going to put it on,''' he said.
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