Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"I attended the recent B'nai Brith conference on "Hate on the Internet," and I was urged to write up a report for this list.
The conference was much better balanced than I had feared, though much more accepting of speech suppression than I would like. The opening panel had Sigurd Werner, a German police official, Nadine Strossen of the ACLU, Alan Borovoy of the Canadian equivalent, McGill law professor Irwin Cotler, and Jeremy Jones from Australia. As you might expect, Borovoy and Strossen were very strongly in favor of allowing Zundel and his ilk to continue without government suppression - Borovoy called for marginalizing them rather than suppressing them.
Sunday evening was a rather tedious series of politicians and others giving congratulatory welcome speeches (interrupted halfway through by a false fire alarm, still unknown as to whether maliciously tripped or a genuine malfunction or non-hostile illegal indoor smoker near a smoke detector) before the ADL's David Hoffman gave a presentation of various racist and antisemitic sites. Ernst Zundel's was one of the milder ones.
On Monday morning there was an opening panel with David Matas of B'nai Brith Canada, who did a truly odious report in favor of censorship. He attacked those who said it can't work on the net as rationalizing a hidden agenda of principled anti-censorship. Jim Mercer, a network architect, gave the technical view. Richard Rosenberg of Electronic Frontier Canada gave another endorsement of free speech. William Pentney of the Canadian Human Rights Commission endorsed Canada's restriction on hate speech, but did raise the very insightful issue of stopping to ask what we are trying to accomplish by our responses.
Following that, there were three parallel workshops - on technical, legal, and philosophical issues. I attended the philosophical session, which had Sol Littman and Richard Rosenberg as panelists. Ken McVay and I both teed off on Littman, who was amazingly patronizing, dismissingly evasive of questions he didn't want to address, and more than a little ignorant. (In his opening address, he repeatedly used the word "flaming" to refer to mailbombing.) Ken told him that he (Littman) was scarier than Zundel. I told Littman that if he didn't exist, Ingrid Rimland (Ernst Zundel's American agent who maintains his website, and sends out daily newsletters to the faithful) would have had to invent him. Of course he dismissed that with an airy, "That's ridiculous."
At lunch there was a talk by Deborah Lipstadt. Unfortunately she had to run to catch a plane right after her talk; I would have liked to have talked with her afterward.
In the afternoon there were five parallel sessions. I was one of two presenters at "The New Rhetoric of Hate" along with Andrew Winston, a psychology professor who spoke about the new "scientific" racism such as that of J. Philippe Rushton. I spoke about the psychology of deniers - their motivations (besides simple antisemitism and racism), the kinds of people particularly susceptible to their message, and the kinds of rhetorical strategies needed to counter them among their prime target population.
That evening there was a public session with a number of panelists - McVay, Cotler, Rosenberg, a Dino Doria of the police, Jeremy Jones, an Israeli whose name escapes me, another CHRC member named Val Romilly (I may have the spelling wrong), Karen Mock of B'nai Brith's League for Human Rights, and a couple others. The moderator was Neil MacDonald of CBC, who did an excellent job, keeping things moving and asking devil's advocate questions of many people.
Tuesday morning we broke into four groups. Three were to formulate legislative, educational, and voluntary nonregulatory responses. The fourth was a closed session for police officers only on investigation. However, Rich Graves and I attended, because the main part was to teach them what they needed to do if someone complained that they received a threat or harassment in email or a Usenet post (Matt Giwer's attempt to intimidate Ken McVay into removing all mention of Giwer from the Nizkor web site was the specific example we used there). I also told them that the people who probably needed our info even more than the hate crimes unit were the fraud squads - to deal with fraudulent and otherwise illegal spams.
After finishing with the police, I moved to the legislative session. The lawyers had wanted to exclude the non-lawyers, but that was successfully protested. Good thing, because the techies had a chance to tell the lawyers that some of what they were thinking about doing was just not going to fly.
I got some indication that I managed to get through to Prof. Cotler, who was pretty pro-control in his opening remarks, that the Internet had a sort of culture and psychology of its own, and perhaps they made legal controls on speech on the Internet less desirable than he previously thought. The techies successfully educated the non-techies that no, there really was no way to keep people from seeing anything short of detaching from the entire Internet.
Most of the suggestions for action were voluntary (e.g., voluntary agreement by ISPs not to host hate sites) and educational rather than legislative. The cops proposed asking for technical resources to conduct investigations, and a (somewhat reasonable) law to require ISPs to keep sendmail logs for seven days to give the police time to request saving off info pending the issuance of a warrant in the case of harassment or threats. (I did warn them that it probably wouldn't fly to require universities, busniesses, etc. to keep the same standards.)
There will be a suggestion that Canada extend its existing hate speech laws to cover other identifiable groups (gays, disabled, women) and probably calls to issue complaints against foreign nationals pushing racist stuff (e.g., Ingrid Rimland) which would have no current effect but would keep her from being able to visit Canada with impunity. So I guess you could say that at least as far as the recommendations from the conference go, the Internet is safe for free speech but Canada is not.
A couple of people thought Zundel's attorney Barbara Kulaszka was at the public sessions on Sunday and Monday nights.
I'm glad I went. A lot of people gave principled free-speech opposition to control, and techies gave their practical reasons for control. Ken McVay and I talked about how people like Zundel got more attention and publicity for their cause by playing the poor free speech martyr than they ever could on their own. There are still those who are pretty cavalier about censoring things they don't like; while I don't think too many of them are less inclined to do it if they thought they could succeed, at least they have accepted that they cannot succeed and shouldn't try.
In some private conversations, I broached the idea of changing the standard to a neutral one of encouragement to violence, regardless of target. (E.g., "Niggers are inferior parasites who commit many crimes" would be protected, but "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" might not and "We should kill all the niggers" would not.) However, I don't think I made any inroads."
(Michael Stein)Thought for the Day:
"White northern Europeans as a group have not been oppressed in this country."
(Barbara Bergen, ADL regional director, San Francisco area,
as quoted in a recent European/American Issues Forum newsletter)