The World Wide Web site of a group called the Charlemagne Hammerskins opens with an image of a man in a ski mask, carrying a gun and standing by a swastika. A click on a button blow labelled, in French, "Access for sub-humans" yields a picture of what appears to be a concentration camp, accompanied by a not-so-veiled threat: "Be assured, we still have many one-way tickets for Auschwitz
The skinhead site is hardly the only one vilifying various ethnic groups. There are many more and most target blacks and Jews, but they are not only ones. One site, based on a computer in Sweden and purporting to belong to a group called Radio Islam, is devoted to questions about the reality of the Holocaust and features caricatures of evil-looking figures with black beards and exaggerated noses, wearing Stars of David.
The hatred that drips from these and other such Web sites, of course, exists independent of any technology and occurs in all media. Indeed, the photographs, monographs and cartoons on many sites are taken from other media, mostly print. But for a group of conferees who met in Geneva in November under the sponsorship of the UN Human Rights Center, the question was how to apply different countries' legal prohibitions against hate speech to this new medium. Michael Schneider, head of the Electronic Commerce Forum in Bonn, which represents German Internet service providers, said there had been several cases in which German authorities had demanded that providers eliminate sites or face prosecution. But he said Internet Service providers cannot control content. "They are nothing more than carriers".
Agha Shahi of Pakistan, the meeting's chairman, said sites that promote racism violate a global treaty against racial discrimination. The 148 countries that signed the pact "are under obligation to enact measures to eliminate it, he said. The United States has signed the document, but has said it will not pass laws infringing free speech.
How to balance ... "the two most powerful revolutions of the 20th century, those of human rights and information technology." ... The Internet "enables the instant marketing of hate and mayhem", said ... Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The number of hate sites has nearly doubled to 600 in the last year, he said; he has catalogued 300. There are at least 94 sites promoting a racial hierarchy that would classify people by skin colour, religion, ethnicity and even preferred language. He counts 87 neo-Nazi sites, 35 white supremacist sites and 51 sites espousing terrorism. It is impossible to determine who is responsible for hate sites, most of which are based on computer servers in the US.
The divergent histories of the United States, with its tradition of free-speech guarantees, and of Europe, with its .. legacy of genocide and its recent history of ethnic strife in the Balkans (are) evident ... Americans ... argue that the Internet cannot be regulated; others (seek) ways to ban offensive sites and punish their sponsors.
With laws varying from country to country, border-jumping is one way to avoid accountability for hate messages. Hate site sponsors also can change service. (Source: The Week, 21 December, 1997)
