Jackboots in cyberspace

There's an old and comforting saying that 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me'.

When I was at school in England, being taunted for being the only Jew in a class of middle-class British kids, let me assure you that words certainly did hurt me. Indeed, those words of antipathy and religious intolerance from the mouths of children who couldn't possibly have understood their significance have proven to be my greatest motivation in working to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

Thanks to racial vilification laws, which exist in this country, the words that can be used in public these days tend to be far more muted. However, the subtext and context of racially motivated communications, be they person-to-person or in the media, are becoming increasingly subtle to stay within the bounds of legislation, yet they are just as damaging.

We read of carloads of youths of 'middle-eastern appearance'; we read of 'Asian gangs'; we read of 'Jewish businessmen'; listen on radio to pundits of intolerance who whip up communal anger at best, hatred at worst. They see no wrong in what they're doing. They believe that they have the right of free speech on their side, and tilt at the windmill of political correctness.

Journalists who report that an Asian was accused of shoplifting, or a Lebanese youth was before the courts for drug crimes, don't seem to have any comprehension of the slander or hurt they are engendering against the entire community by gratuitously identifying the individual's race or religion when it often has no bearing on the case.

But there's another side to this coin. One that is just as damaging to minority communities. It might please the Aboriginal community for such champions as Cathy Freeman to be identified as an Aboriginal athlete, but is Shane Warne ever identified as a white Anglo Australian? We will all be on much safer ground when we think of Cathy as a gold medal Olympian and Shane as a great Australian bowler.

The unwarranted identification of a racial or religious characteristic in speech perpetuates the gulfs which are growing between the cultures of our multicultural society. I'm not, of course, proposing the abolition of identifiers where they are significant. If the religion, race, ethnicity or persuasion of an individual is essential to the narrative, then by all means use it…but if nothing turns on it, then better to leave it out.

Some years ago, feminists around the world changed our thoughts by forcing us to change our language. Now that racial vilification is so prevalent and finding new media for propagation, I believe that the time is right for a fresh look at the international standards we apply for racial, religious, ethnic and other aspects of identification.

There is a frightening growth in intolerance towards refugees, migrants, and minority ethnic communities, not just here in Australia but throughout the world. Racial intolerance and vilification is unquestionably on the rise. Now is the time to work towards a new language, new protocols, and new standards for all media, in all countries.

Of course, the biggest problem which faces this sort of anti-vilification challenge is the concept of freedom of speech. How often have we heard that we must have fewer restrictions on what we can say and do, and all in the name of freedom of speech?

While the opponents of racial vilification legislation talk about the rights of the majority to say what they like, they always seem to forget that it's the often-powerless minority that bears the brunt of the abuses that this very freedom enables.

And if you'll forgive me, I'd like to quote Kierkegaard, who said that people demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid. This is all becoming increasingly urgent because today we have a medium which has become so powerful for spreading vilification and hatred, that a whole new set of international laws and standards needs to be written to protect those in our society who are powerless.

The Internet has enabled the grandchildren of Adolf Hitler, the heirs to Josef Goebbels, to acquire a whole new audience, a world-wide community which six months ago was estimated to be over half a billion people, and which other estimates put at over a billion…one sixth of the world's population…in three years time.

These facists, proudly calling themselves neo-Nazis and wearing the unmistakable insignia of Hitler and his storm troopers, sprouting the age-old vilifying canards about Jews and Asians and Catholics and Blacks, have improved on the use of radio and newspapers perfected by Goebbels.

They have now attached themselves to the Internet, and are using cyberspace to reach minds which are often untutored in the truth of history and open to all manner of suggestion. Young people often wander the Internet alone, and away from the eyes of their families, and so rarely is there a censoring or parental mind at hand when a youngster comes across a virulent racist site.

The vast majority of the fascists who are now using the Internet as their medium for communication are to be found in America, Germany and to a lesser extent in Canada and the United Kingdom. Of course, there are racial hatred and vilification sites in many other countries, dedicated to the destruction of particular racial, religious or ethnic groups, or those professing a particular lifestyle.

But in terms of general hatreds…hatred of everyone who isn't white, Anglo-Saxon and following a hideously narrow branch of Protestantism…the majority originate in America. This has been the case since the Internet first became popular. But there's a brand new development, something, which has only just started to happen, something, which can be dated back to September 11th, something which should worry all of us.

This is growing conflation of the camps of the extremists. Suddenly we find that Islamic militants and neo-Nazi Christian groups are becoming confluent in purpose, if not confluent in ideology.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director, Abraham Cooper, calls it Trans-national hate, in which the technology of the Internet has united haters from all around the globe, forming the most unusual of bedfellows.

Suddenly Islamic extremists, neo-Nazis, fundamentalist Christians and other cancerous groups from the United States to Russia, from Switzerland to Pakistan, from South America to Japan, are all finding in each other validation for their virulently racist ideologies.

Now one would never ever have thought that a neo-Nazi skinhead from Berlin would happily sit down in a café and discuss his ideologies with a member of the World Church of the Creator, or an Islamic terrorist group, but that's what's happening in cyberspace on the Internet.

Because of the invisibility of the communicators, the only thing which seems to matter in cyberspace is the object of their hatred…blacks, Jews, Gays…the usual pantheon of victims. These groups of haters are sharing their ideas, reading each others' messages, supporting each others' positions.

The extremists in Australia, of course, slavishly follow the credos espoused by their peers in other countries. While in this country we certainly have our own home-grown brand of racially intolerant and prejudiced individuals, from One Nation to the League of Rights, most of the newer extremists have adopted the language, iconography and even the nuances of America.

Just as an example, let me relate to you reaction of local extremists of the far right to the September 11th assault against America.

• The Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) - the Australian arm of the US-based Lyndon LaRouche fascist political cult - suggested the attacks were the work of a cabal of Jewish bankers based in London.

• A statement published in Australia, made by American Matt Hale, the leader of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator - which has branches in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia - stated that the cause of the attacks was "the control of the United States and other world governments by International Jewry and its lackeys".

• On another level, on the day after the attack, Neil Baird, the NSW treasurer of the One Nation Party, issued a special notice to subscribers of his far-right email forum.

• The News Report, which included a claim that the attacks have facilitated the suppression of freedoms. These include the implementation of emergency legislation, which could eventually lead to the "registration of every man, woman and child to report to his local post office with car keys, mortgage, bank book and cheque book" and the "military invasion" of 120 major cities.

There are many other instances over the past four or so years of the use of the Internet to spread racial intolerance in Australia, and to propagate lies and distortions in order to satisfy a particular personal or group philosophy.

Among the most notorious, of course, is Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute, who was recently jailed in Germany for denial of the Holocaust. Toben is one side of the division, which runs between the neo-Nazis and the self-appointed truth-seekers who inhabit that small corner of the Internet dedicated to hatred.

The division is between the pseudo-scientific-historical research 'institutes' such as David Irving's FPP and Frederick Toben's Adelaide Institute, where they purport to examine the Holocaust in order to verify its truth, and the virulent and odious racist and religious sites dedicated to their own supremacy and their fear and hatred of others who are different.

On the pseudo-academic websites, vapid and irrelevant discussions are trotted out, picking up on minute supposed inconsistencies in the narrative of the Holocaust, purporting to offer proof that the Holocaust didn't happen.

On the other side of the divide are the pseudo-religious and neo-Nazi sites such as the Church of Christian Identity, the World Church of the Creator or Stormfront, hate sites which don't bother to pretend they are publishing the truth, but merely propagate their odious libels in the hope of attracting new converts.

This, today, is the new battleground. This is the medium in which the latest battle in the war against racial and religious vilifiers is about to be fought. So far, the racists have struck most of the blows, because civil libertarians and governments are still trying to reconcile the rights of citizens and the freedom of information they deserve with the rights of minorities to be protected.

Soon, I hope, the battle will turn, and the vilifiers will have fewer and fewer places in cyberspace where they can meet.