Cyber-Hate Panelists Duel Over Line Between Free Speech, Racism

As the chairman of Bertelsmann media group Monday trumpeted the power of the World Wide Web to educate and enlighten, a researcher from the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center used the German company’s Internet services to download a digital copy of Adolf Hitler’s racist diatribe, “Mein Kampf.”

The incident wasn’t just an embarrassment for Bertelsmann’s Thomas Middelhoff, whose company is obliged to uphold German laws against hate-mongering in cyberspace. It also was proof that state regulation is relatively powerless to prevent the misuse of technology even in countries that want to do so.

More troubling for Europeans, who are unaccustomed to the sweeping rights to free speech bestowed on U.S. citizens by the 1st Amendment, is the widening gulf across the Atlantic in attitudes toward curbing Internet traffic that expresses racist extremism.

Web sites banned in Europe are able to resurface on the Internet from the haven of the United States, where their sponsors’ message is protected as an expression of opinion.

The Holocaust has indelibly imprinted on Europeans, especially Germans, the need to be vigilant against racism and intolerance. And those monitoring the social and political pulse on the Continent are increasingly distressed with the dual power of the U.S. to dominate the Internet and protect the rights of those who would deny free speech to others.

In Germany, it is illegal to incite hatred or racism, and sales or public displays of offensive symbols such as Nazi swastikas are outlawed. Hate literature such as “Mein Kampf” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” also are banned in Germany and most other countries of the European Union. But any thwarted radical can find fellowship on the Internet--mostly from Web sites and e-commerce offerings on the uncensored U.S. information highway.

“English-language editions of ‘Mein Kampf’ have a large market in the United States, especially in places like Idaho, but I don’t believe they should be so readily available in Germany,” Middelhoff observed during an international symposium here on the Internet’s role in spreading hate.

But to the German media magnate’s chagrin, a researcher from the Wiesenthal Center, which was a sponsor of the discussion, was at that very moment using Bertelsmann’s Internet connections to U.S. content providers to obtain a copy of Hitler’s book in this former capital of the Third Reich.

“It was not an attempt to embarrass him but to illustrate how deep the problem is by showing in real time how easy it is to get this material, even where there are laws against it,” said Mark Weitzman, director of the Wiesenthal Center’s task force against hate.

The center used the Berlin forum to unveil a CD-ROM report, “Digital Hate 2001,” detailing the growth of racist propaganda on the Internet. Among the more than 2,000 Web sites identified as pandering to racists are games--designed to indoctrinate children and others--whose creators spread xenophobia by squatting on Web sites whose names evoke images of human rights champions.

Racist organizations are “rewriting and recasting history” on the Internet, and there are no online librarians to help readers of the disguised propaganda to analyze its veracity, warned Rabbi Abraham Cooper, assistant dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

“We need to find ways not only of protecting our privacy but our very identity,” Cooper said of the practice of Internet users claiming and using a misleading Web address.

German President Johannes Rau and Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin urged an overall tightening of laws against use of the Internet to spread hate. European industry leaders likewise supported some state intervention.

Calling for registration of Web sites and their authors, Internet communications chief Robert Cailliau of Switzerland’s CERN, the European nuclear physics laboratory, observed that no one questions a car rental agency’s right to demand a driver’s license and that the same should be expected for Internet use.

The message from the U.S. forum participants, however, was against any regulation that infringes on free-speech protections.

“In the United States, we make a fundamental distinction between hate speech and hate crimes,” explained Michael A. Vatis of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division.

“The answer to hateful speech is not to prohibit it but to approach it head on and fight it with rational speech,” Vatis said.

Under moral pressure or threat of boycotts, some U.S. e-commerce marketers have bowed to foreign sensitivities or laws. Online bookseller Amazon.com has programmed its computers to reject delivery of “Mein Kampf” to addresses in Germany and the Netherlands because its sale is banned in both countries, Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said.