It's an image that would chill the blood of anyone but an adamant anti-Semite: a young Jew wearing a yarmulke, stunned in an explosion of glass by an avenging skinhead bursting out of his computer screen.
The fact that the image - which once adorned whitepower.com - looks like it was torn out of a teenager's comic book from the Third Reich doesn't make it any less ominous to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, assistant dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a 400,000-member organization dedicated to remembrance of the Holocaust and the defense of human rights. The fact that whitepower.com is no longer online is good news to Cooper, who is spearheading the center's efforts to get 5,000 CD-ROM copies of its new report, Racism, Mayhem & Terrorism: The Emergence of an Online Subculture of Hate, into the hands of policymakers in Congress, the Pentagon, the FBI, and law enforcement agencies all over the country.
President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore already have their own copies of the report, which is a guided tour of what Cooper calls "the lunatic fringe" of anti-Semitic, Christian Identity, white supremacist, pro-militia and other groups on the Web: organizations like Stormfront, the National Alliance, the Zundelsite, and the Covenant Vision Ministry. (The Black Panthers, Radio Islam, and Sinn Fein are included in the center's list of hate-mongering groups, but the Jewish Defense League's site - which earned a link on HateWatch for statements like "a million Arabs are not worth one Jewish fingernail" - is not.)
One of the people who should see the CD-ROM, Cooper says, is Bill Gates.
"This is a wake-up call ... to the same geniuses who gave us this incredible technology," he declares, saying that he gave Clinton an early version of the report at a White House coffee last year. "These groups are no longer invading high school locker rooms to put flyers in the lockers.... The new battlefield of hate is the Internet."
The Wiesenthal Center - which also hosts educational programs, a Web-based radio station, a film production company, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles - is increasingly turning its attention and its manpower to sounding that wake-up call. Cooper estimates that the center staff now spends 80 percent of its research hours surfing the Net for offensive sites and logging information about them, with full-time staffers in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles.
The aim of the center's efforts, says Cooper, is to "marginalize the message, and marginalize the messengers" of anti-Semitism, racism, and Holocaust denial. Cooper says the "traditional American approach" of saying "the answer to hate speech is more speech doesn't compute" on the Web. Why?
"The power of the Web lies in its ability to present your ideas in an unassailable fashion. It has the impact of advertising," Cooper explains. Cooper sees Web pages like the cartoon of the skinhead bursting out of the computer as specifically targeting young people and other "minority" groups who "don't even know they're being targeted."
In Cooper's view, one danger of the Net is that "there's no librarian. The search engines are Russian roulette. If your 9-year-old daughter is given an astronomy assignment and she goes to AltaVista or Excite, if the bells and whistles on the Flat Earth Society page are better, she'll never get to Carl Sagan."
The center's message - which Cooper has delivered to audiences at the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, and on the Microsoft campus - is that today's Resistance Records homepage, online incitement to "racial holy war," or typed-in copy of "The Terrorist's Handbook" could "inspire tomorrow's Timothy McVeigh."
Cooper says he is carrying the message to law enforcement officials and ISPs all over the world - "democracy by democracy" - simply to "stir up debate" and "get the people who have the expertise to come to the table" to talk about how to deal with this kind of content on the Net - whether by creating new kinds of filtering software, encouraging ISPs not to host certain kinds of content, or passing legislation.
Without outright declaring that the sites archived on the Wiesenthal Center's CD-ROM - many of which are no longer online - should be prohibited by law, which "goes against American tradition," Cooper suggests that Germany's laws against public display of Nazi iconography, and Canada's laws banning hate speech on telephone lines, may provide useful models for a response to promotion of certain offensive or dangerous ideas on the Web.
One step in the right direction, Cooper observes, was last year's passage of an amendment introduced by US Senator Dianne Feinstein prohibiting the dissemination of bombmaking instructions for criminal purposes. One of the justifications for the new law, the California Democrat argued, was the accessibility of such information on the Internet.
The CD-ROM claims that the center tracked an explosion of hate on the Web in the year preceding the fall of 1997, identifying more than 600 "problematic sites" - "an increase of 300 percent."
Cooper admits, however, that only 25,000 to 40,000 Americans are directly involved in the groups whose sites are listed - numbers, he says, "that have not really grown since the Internet came along."
The Wiesenthal Center's own Web site hosted more than 1 million visitors last year. The center is planning to open a second site in February, containing the contents of its multimedia learning center.
"We embrace the technology," Cooper says. "It's an incredibly powerful opportunity for recruitment.... All technology is neutral. The question is, who's going to be the engine behind it?"
