Jackboots in cyberspace

• 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.