dawn.com
20 October 1999 Wednesday 10 Rajab 1420
DIPY: Dedicated IndoPhobic Yankee
R U what U claim to be or WANNABE WHITE
VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena are boy scouts compared to the following pernicious outfits.
Your diatribe against India and the above outfits is similar to the following
The dark side of free speech By Gumisai Mutume
MEXICO CITY: Among the thousands of sites on the Internet is one that welcomes visitors
with a eulogy to Adolf Hitler and then launches into an anti-Semitic tirade before declaring that
it is not a racist site.
A discussion forum within the site pours out a diatribe against Jews declaring that "Christians
have been fooled and deceived, just like the Bible has warned us. Don't be fooled, and stop
being fooled by the Jews of today...they are deceivers, liars, anti- Christ and anti-Christian."
Another site spews out a stream of invective against African Americans. Someone who calls
himself "Ku Klux Klan" declares that "...niggers invented carjacking." It goes on to attack any
political establishment that expounds anything short of the extreme far-right point of view.
Such inflammatory statements would never be allowed in the pages of most newspapers of the
world, as they would be categorised as "hate" speech, disavowed by most reputable
publishers.
But in the new information age of the Internet, anything goes.
The fact that cyberspace allows complete freedom of speech - unbridled and ungoverned -
and anyone can promote whatever cause he or she wishes, is of growing concern to
supporters of human rights.
"The ability of hate groups to use the Internet to recruit has made it much easier for them to
spread misinformation and incite violence anonymously," says Karen Narasaki, Executive
Director of US-based advocacy group, the National Asian Pacific American Legal
Consortium (NAPALC).
"We are in the process of analyzing many of the issues raised by the Internet. Some countries,
like Canada, have specific exceptions for hate speech from their Freedom of Speech
protections," Narasaki told IPS during an interview conducted via the Internet by e-mail.
"But the fact that Canadian citizens can easily cross the border and set up hate websites in the
United States makes it much more difficult for Canada to enforce its laws. The issue of hate
speech on the Internet needs to be resolved on a global level - not just by the United States."
Nevertheless, racial violence continues to exist in the United States where arson attacks on
churches attended by African Americans have risen to their worst level since the 1960s.
In Europe, the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW)
reports that at least 41 people were killed last year as a result of racial violence. In Britain
alone, an estimated 130,000 incidents involving race occurred in the past 12 months.
Such statistics concern rights activists who must figure out how to make the Internet a more
friendlier place while preserving the democratic right of freedom of expression.
Advocates of free speech have stuck to their guns against any regulation or censorship of the
Internet.
Last month, at a global Internet policy conference in Munich, Germany, delegates threw out a
proposed international Internet rating system saying it would provide governments with a
blueprint for censorship.
The 300 executives and experts in the fields of technology, law and governance - who met to
discuss ways to control illegal or potentially harmful material on the Internet - agreed that the
way forward should be without government regulation.
Instead, they emphasize the need for education and parental supervision.
Barry Steinhardt, Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed
that to criminalize online communication would violate the US constitution.
"We said it before, we say it now and we'll keep saying it - even after software programmes
try to block us - proposals like this will transform the Internet from a true marketplace of ideas
into just another mainstream, lifeless medium," Steinhardt told the Munich gathering.
Still the evidence of racial intolerance among some Internet users continues to rise. Earlier this
year a member ofa white supremacist organization in the United States killed an African-
American man, a Korean student and wounded nine other ethnic and religious minorities during
a two-state shooting spree.
He belonged to a racist organization that hosts a site on the Internet.
In June last year James Byrd, a black man, was killed when three white supremacists dragged
him behind their pickup truck near Jasper, Texas. Activists blamed the attack on racial hatred.
Yet one Internet site shouts: "The White race has suffered under such a degenerate religion for
far too long. It is time that the White Man wakes up and throws off the yoke of Christianity.
The White Race needs a religion that instead of considering our folk to be worthless sinners,
considers them, especially the greater people among them, the highest product of evolution in
existence. What the white man needs is creativity!"
As far back as 1995, the man attributed with bringing hate speech to cyberspace, Ku Klux
Klan member Don Black, had been quick to notice the potential of the Internet to fan the white
racist movement.
"The Internet has had a pretty profound influence on a (white supremacist) movement whose
resources are limited. The access is anonymous and there is unlimited ability to communicate
with others of a like-mind," he said at the time.
During the early 1980s Black was jailed for conspiring to invade and overthrow the
government of the Dominican Republic and establish white nation on the Caribbean island.
During his time in prison, he learned computer programming skills which he went on to use to
publish white supremacist propaganda, notes "Hatewatch", one of a growing number of
Internet watchers that track and fight hate speech.
Black went online with the first web-based hate page in 1995 - "a page that marked a
paradigm shift in the use of this new information medium as a tool for the racist right," says
Hatewatch.
Black realized that the Internet eliminated geographical and monetary boundaries that had
existed for white supremacists and his site now serves as an organizational hub for
right-wingers, it adds.
The message that Black and others churn out strikes home in many areas of the world.
"Every time we go out of the house we get spat at and pushed. They yell at us, 'Paki rubbish,
go home.' They come to our house and kick the door," testifies one victim of racial violence in
Britain.
"They smear excrement on the door...We do not feel free. We are not safe to leave our
house," says 'Amin' in the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report 'Racist Violence in the United
Kingdom.'
HRW says the irony is that such intolerance takes place at a time when the world is pulling
down borders and trade barriers, when the world's population is at its most educated level and
when global travel is at its highest.
Still, rights activists remain concerned that misrepresentations in the past that have created
images of minorities and refugees as a burden will continue unabated in the unfettered new
Information Age World in countries since the colonial era.-Dawn/Inter Press Service. |
