Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

COMMUNICATION: This Fight Is Not Virtual Any More

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Jun 18 2004 (IPS) - The emails seemed inoffensive. The sender seemed to be a German official or a journalist with either the Der Spiegel weekly or the broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

The emails linked the receiving computer automatically to the neo-Nazi ‘National Socialist Information Site’ (NSINFO) seen by many Internet experts as among the most dangerous web addresses.

NSINFO, a Slovak site hosted by a Russian provider feeds right-wing extremists material on “the enemies of the white race” and calls for their elimination.

NSINFO is not alone. The U.S. Internet site Hoozajew (Who is a Jew) asks visitors to provide names, addresses and telephone numbers of people of Jewish origin.

The French site ‘Collectif pour une information authentiquement juive’ (collective for authentic Jewish information) identifies “traitors (Jews daring to criticise Israeli policies) who deserve death without process.”

The virtual could be spilling over into the actual. “There exists a direct link between this propaganda on the one side, and racist, anti-Semitic crimes on the other,” French foreign minister Michel Barnier told a conference on racism on the Internet held by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Paris this week.

The OSCE is the largest regional security organisation in the world with 55 participating states from Europe, Central Asia and North America. It is active in early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.

Michael Wine, director of the Community Security Trust that seeks to protect British Jews said “we know that there has been an explosion of the number of sites encouraging hatred and racism on the Internet, and at the same we witness an alarming increase of tensions between religious and ethnical communities.”

Wine said the riots across several cities in northern Britain in 2002 followed racist calls over the Internet by the far right groups the British National Party and the National Front. Members of the British Redwatch and the German Antifa (anti-fascist associations) groups were also attacked after neo-Nazi calls sent by email, Wine said.

The conference called to discuss a code for Internet providers to weed out racist messages revealed the extent of hatred on the web.

Up to 60,000 racist sites function across the world, Marc Knobel, founder of J’accuse (I accuse), a French association against racism on the Internet told the meeting. Barnier said that “between 2000 and 2004, the number of racist sites grew 300 percent.”

But the conference attended by representatives of the 55 OSCE countries found legislative difficulties in the way of preventive action.

“The European Union wants to attack the problem (of violence in Internet) from the point of view of regulation,” U.S. ambassador to the OSCE Stephan Minike told the conference. “For us in the United States the bottom line is what our constitution allows us to do.”

Minikes said the U.S. government preferred a “voluntary approach” to block racism and hatred on the Internet. “The private sector is intelligent enough to deal with the problem,” he said.

That has not worked so far. In November 2000 a French tribunal threatened to impose a heavy fine on the U.S. Internet search engine and web directory Yahoo! for hosting auctions of neo-Nazi memorabilia. French law forbids the exhibition and sale of such objects.

Yahoo! first argued that the auctions were compatible with the U.S. constitutional guarantee of free expression. It later accepted the French demand to stop hosting such sales, but also asked the U.S. judiciary to consider whether French laws were applicable outside France.

Beyond the legislative differences that Internet providers exploit, the OSCE conference highlighted ideological disagreements and technical difficulties in controlling racism and calls to violence on the web.

Activists said the non-binding code of good behaviour on the Internet agreed upon during the conference was “a soft law” inappropriate to fight back racism.

Non-governmental associations have been promoting such codes for years. In the Netherlands the International Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH) has identified 1,242 sites with anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic content.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Suzette Bronkhost from INACH. “You cannot examine and filter the millions of addresses that exist on the Internet.”

Meriem Marzouki who leads the French association IRIS (“Imaginons un réseau Internet solidaire, Imagine a harmonious Internet”) told IPS “what we really need is strong sanctions at the international level, regardless of what national laws say.”

The code of good behaviour the conference agreed upon amounts to “governments’ lack of will to really fight back racism on the web. Instead of establishing clear rules, the governments agreed to give up their legislative authority, and to transfer their responsibility to technicians and powerless associations.”