With the Web, Global Issues Hit a Little Closer to Home

As news has spread of the campaign to pressure the Swiss government to return money to Holocaust victims and their heirs, the issue has turned increasingly personal for thousands of families. “How does this worldwide debate affect me?” many have asked. “How can my family find its lost assets?”

Actually, some of the answers have been easier to obtain as a result of a Web site database. It’s from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (https://www.wiesenthal.com), the main driver in the campaign to challenge Swiss bankers who may still be holding as much as $30 billion in unreturned accounts from Jews and other victims of the Nazis.

In February, the Swiss government announced creation of a $4.7-billion fund to be financed by the sale of some of the gold reserves of the Swiss National Bank.

In addition to publicizing the Wiesenthal Center’s public statements and its explanations of the legal maneuverings, the Web site offers access to a database of 1,500 accounts frozen during World War II. As with most databases, this one can be mined for information by family name, country of origin and other identifiers.

In a talk recently with Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, it became clear that the Web is starting to play a role in personalizing worldwide issues and fostering various kinds of social activism.

“We absolutely would not be able to accomplish what we are doing without the Web,” Cooper said. “It has helped us to reach people in all parts of the world and let them find out for themselves whether there is information about this issue that affects them.”

He told of a particular family that the center had tried to track down in Canada in connection with Swiss assets; the trail led electronically and circuitously to an unrelated family of similar name in Brazil.

“The point is that with all that we hear about how hate groups and dark forces have taken to the Internet, there is room here for the Internet to become a road for social activism as well,” Cooper said. “It is an important frontier.”

Over the last 18 months, the Wiesenthal Center has found itself arguing on both sides of the activist question. It has taken a lead position on warning the public about the ease with which hate groups have moved quickly to take advantage of the medium.

In an article in The Times last year, Cooper argued for accountability rather than anonymity by electronic publishers, and some kind of acceptability guidelines by those providing access for electronic publishing.

Since then, the Wiesenthal Center has found itself using the Internet to collect complaints about hate groups and to do such things as gather tips on church burnings.

Social action, indeed.

Such activities are taking many forms. The federal government recently announced it was making available airline safety records through its Federal Aviation Administration site, https://www.faa.gov. The idea apparently is to allow potential fliers to make their own judgments about the safety of their aircraft.

The policy was enacted after criticism that the FAA had withheld public information about the ValuJet plane that crashed in Florida last year, killing 110 people.

It is likely that few among us would feel we could make better safety judgments about aircraft than investigators for the FAA, but somehow it is encouraging to know that it is more possible than it was previously to question the official information.

I also spoke recently with a Los Angeles musician who was working to organize the protests against the until-recently all-male tradition of the Vienna Philharmonic, which was appearing in Costa Mesa.

The musician, Nora Graham, argued that she would not have been able to collect information about the orchestra’s employment practices and history, or reach other musicians and other potential protesters, without the global Internet.

Such activism seems a literal reading of the “Think Globally, Act Locally” slogans born in the ‘60s.

In fact, check out WebActive: What’s New in Activism Online (https://www.webactive.com), published by Progressive Networks, the Seattle-based company that produced RealAudio. It features interviews and information and a directory of 1,200 or so sites that deal with such issues as the environment, feminism, consumerism and the like.

So far, the Internet’s record as a social organizing medium is mixed. There are some causes that are already thriving electronically--mostly concerning issues that directly affect the Net itself--though in many cases it’s not clear that Net activists are yet having a lot of impact.

Spinoff groups have formed after meeting through the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org) about Internet censorship issues.

A day of protest against censorship last year drew tens of thousands of participants--though political support for the reviled censorship law, the Communications Decency Act, seems as strong as ever.

And there are lots of groups that have sprung up about junk e-mail, customer complaints (particularly on America Online) and specific environmental issues.

It’s true that there is no way for socially active groups to learn about the power of the Internet other than trying it.

“The problem is that there is a lack of critical thinking out there,” Cooper said. “This should become a force to improve our world, to extend our humanity.”

He added: “It is a curiosity that the first people in our world to become adept at using the Internet were the hate groups. We now see the grandchildren moving toward using the Net. The question is, who will be talking with them?”

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Terry Schwadron is editor of Life & Style and oversees latimes.com, The Times’ Web site. He can be reached via e-mail at terry.schwadron@latimes.com