One Good Thing, Coming to An End, 3/31/06

All good things must end, and so it is with this fellowship. It has been a great pleasure to have the opportunity to be the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the International Center for Tolerance Education, Brooklyn, New York.

My term as Scholar in Residence ends on Thursday, 3/31/06. And, with the end of the gig comes the end of this blog.

If you'd like to contact me, please do so via: jdaniels (at) hunter.cuny.edu.

AUSTRALIA MOVES ON RACIST WEB SITE

My friend Ladi sent me this:

AUSTRALIA MOVES ON RACIST WEB SITE

A white supremacist group, which holds Jews, African Americans and other minority groups as inferior, has based part of its activities in Adelaide, Australia. The US-based White Crusaders of the RaHoWa have set up a local Web site, which lists a contact address as a suburban Adelaide post office box and an Australian business number. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has referred it to local police in a bid to have it shut down.

From here.

Smartmobs to Lynch Mobs

I suppose this was inevitable, text-messaging used to incite racial violence, transforming a "smartmob" into a lynch mob.

From the BBC News:


A Sydney man has been charged with sending SMS messages to incite violence in the days following the city's race riots, Australian police have said.

The 33-year-old man - the first to be charged with such an offence - faces a maximum three-year jail term.

Police say they expect to make similar arrests in the coming days.

Thousands of white men attacked people of Middle Eastern appearance on a beach in Sydney on 11 December, apparently in revenge for an attack on two men.

Violence by both sides continued for two nights, and text messages inciting further unrest the following weekend were sent around Sydney and other areas of Australia.

About 2,000 officers patrolled Sydney's beaches last weekend, in a huge operation designed to prevent such unrest taking place.

More arrests likely

The suspect, whose identity has not been released, is believed to have forwarded messages calling for people to meet at two Sydney beaches last Sunday.

He has been released on bail and is scheduled to appear in court on 1 February.

Police Commander Dennis Bray told ABC radio that detectives and phone companies were working hard to trace many other text messages sent about the riots.

"We've been working in the last week in gathering and analyzing information we've obtained from the carriers, and this fellow was identified as one fellow that had been sending messages and we've acted," he said.

"There will be more, but at this stage he unfortunately was the first one."

Meanwhile the New South Wales state government has announced an A$250,000 ($183,000) campaign to bring tourists back to Sydney's beaches.

Some beach-side businesses have reported a slump in takings by up to 75% since the unrest.

"Now it's time to return to these local beach communities to show your support," New South Wales Tourism Minister Sandra Nori told local people on Thursday.

Advertisements for the area, featuring well-known sports stars, have been designed to persuade people it is safe to return.

This week, the authorities in Britain, Canada and Indonesia issued warnings to their citizens to be on guard for possible continuing racial violence at Sydney's beaches.

But there has been no apparent fall in tourists flying to Australia for the busy Christmas period.

Source

Project Implicit

In Boston this week, visiting with some of the folks who created Project Implicit, an online quiz that gets at some of the cognitive aspects of all sorts of prejudice.

Closing Remarks from Foxman, Eissens, Wolf

To close the conference, we heard closing remarks from Abraham Foxman in which he emphasized the importance of 'words' in the Jewish tradition, in the creation and in the elimination of hate.

And, in the final remarks of the day, Ronald Eissens, General Director of INACH and Christopher Wolf, the Chair of INACH, summarized and closed the conference.

We ended at just after noon, and then they served lunch, and everyone chatted for a couple of hours and slowly dispersed over the course of the afternoon.

The meeting was a big success and generated a lot of interesting discussion!

Q&A with Erickson

A human rights lawyer attending asks about the availability of illegal material in Canada that's accessible through U.S.-based ISPs.

Erickson allows that this "is a problem," but reminds the audience that the Internet relies on "open architecture" from "end to end" and that the Internet willl eventually be "only pipes" that allow for largely "peer-to-peer" exchanges.

Q&A and Informal Chats

Interesting Q&A after the last panel, and informal chat among those in attendance. Met Catherine Smith, from SPLC and University of Denver who is doing important work in this area. Her work is a breath of fresh air in an area, we agreed, is lacking a critical perspective. The shift from focusing on white supremacy to focusing on animal rights and Muslim groups is noteworthy.

Internet Industry Perspective: NetCoalition

Markham Erickson, of NetCoalition, a trade group representing Internet companies such as Yahoo and Google. is now giving a presentation on the industry perpsecitve on what he refers to as "objectionable" content on the Internet. He contends that the Internet companies, such as Google and Yahoo, rely on monitoring by the public to report offensive material because there are

Erickson talks briefly about the controversy over the query term"jew" and the result "JewWatch" in Google. This changed (somewhat) with advocacy groups changing their metatags to include the term "jew," and Google put other sponsored sites in response to that query term. Basically, he points to this as an instance of success of the ISP's in responding to these issues.

Recommends: education, particuarly the youn; parental involvement and supervision, NGO activism, technical solutions, prosecution when sites cross into criminal behavior (violence & fraud).

Erickson mentions the OSCE Conference in Paris, and highlights this quote to encapsulate the industry's stance on hate online:

"Rather than fear the purveyors of hate, let us confront them in the marketplace of ideas, where the bright light of truth will expose their bigotry and their lies can be unmasked."
- Stephen Minikes, Ambassador to the U.S. Mission to the OSCE, as delivered to the June 17, 2004 OSCE Meeting on the Relationship between Racist, Xenophobia, and Anti-Semitic Propaganda on the Internet and Hate Crimes.

The way to combat hateful ideas is not to have someone in the government regulate it, but to have more robust speech in the marketplace of ideas, and the ideas which are not objectionable will win the day.

Connection between Online Hate & Offline Hate Crimes

Brian Marcus, of the ADL, moderating this panel raises the excellent (and as yet, unanswered) question.

How is online hate connected to offline hate crimes?

Pascal Hertzscholdt, answers that these are connected, but didn't mention specific examples (or, perhaps I missed it).

Sgt. Camp, does not see an increase in hate crime because of the Internet, but does see the Internet as emboldening some.

David Dietch, sees several specific examples. He mentions email groups related to Muslim jihad, where the Internet facilitated participation of individuals. He also mentions that videos you used to only be able to acquire at obscure bookstores are now widely available as free downloads on the Internet. On the domestic side, he again mentions the animal rights groups.

I'm troubled by the shift in focus away from white supremacist groups, and think that this is telling in some ways.

Obstacles to Effective Prosecution

Dietch continues....with obstalces to effective prosecution, including: evidence connecting defendant to web site; evidence connecting defendant to postings; international collection of evidence.

In addition, Dietch sites the "First Amendment/Free Speech" issue. Dietch claims that there is an "atmosphere" within the U.S. that "speech is free," though "of course, all speech is not protected." He argued in the Al Hussein case that the issue was not speech, it was conduct. Dietch contends that an important strategy to this obstacle to prosecution is to make this distinction between speech and conduct. He goes on to say that satisfying the standard of the Brandenburg case, which is that the language has to be imminent incitement to action. Dietch believes that it is sufficient to prove that someone visited a web site and then later joined the jihad, but a judge in one case did not agree.

Domestic Terrorism, U.S. DOJ

David B. Deitch, on "Enforcement and Prosecutions of Online Extermism and/or Terrorism in the European and U.S. Context." Deitch is the Domestic Terrorism Coordinator, in the U.S. Department of Justice, in the counter-terrorist section.

Deitch sketches out the changes in the DOJ after 9/11, including 1) renewed focus on counterterrorism, 2) institutional reform that sought to enhance sharing of information, 3) new strategic emphasis on prevention.

There are different levels of Material Support Using the Internet (public opinion, sympathizers, supporters, soldiers, and leaders). Dietch uses a pyramid schematic to sketcht this out, and this puts me in mind of the schematic I developed about "lurkers" and "true believers" online. Nice convergence, there.

Reiterates the global audience aspect of the Internet to disseminate propaganda of an extremist group, and also the logistic goals of the organization.

Advantages of the Internet for extremist groups, anonymity, global audience, very little regulation, inexpensive, easy to re-open (not just web sites, but also listservs, discussion boards, etc.)

Dietch discusses the case of Azzam Publications (formerly on the web as www.azzam.com), which provided support for various Muslim terrorist groups. The other case Dietch mentions Alasr Magazine, of the Islamic Assembly of North America, and their online presence (formerly on the web as www.alasr.ws). He sites the Alasr example as a case where there was a need for international cooperation: server was in Houston, then moved to Canada, author was Egyptian, web masters were in Idaho and in Michigan. In May, 2001, this web site was saying that a modern way to "kill a great number of the enemy" is to "fly a plane into a building."

The next example Dietch is addressing is "Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)," a Philadelphia, PA-based animal rights groups (www.shacamerica.com). This is seen as objectionable because the organization posts "targets of the week," but as I understand it these targets are vendors who do business with Huntingdon. I see this as an important distinction, and a problematic equivalence that Dietch is drawing.

His final example is the anti-abortion doctor's web site.

Dietch details the U.S. prosecution tools: 1) "Material support to terrorists" [18 USC, 2339A], 2) "material support to designated foreign terrorist organization," [18 USC, 2339B], 3) "money laundering" [18 USC, 1960], 4) IEEPA violation, [50 USC, 1705(b)] for groups that have special designation as a terrorist organization, 5) "solicitation," [18 USC, 373], and finally, 6) "teaching construction of improvised explosive incendiary device" [18 USC, 842p]. Dietch mentions the last as particularly useful in prosecuting web site cases where extremists publish information about bomb-making.

Edmonton Hate Crimes Unit

Sgt. Stephen Camp, of the Edmonton, Canada, Hate Crimes Unit, presenting on, "Combatting Hate at the Municipal Level," and his unit's work against hate online.

They consider hate crimes as counter to fundamental principles of the Canadian charter, which recognizes multicultural values and human dignity.

Only two people to staff the Hate Crimes Unit, vastly understaffed to address many goals.

Law enforcement in Canada is able to address online activity based on their law against, "Wilful Promotion of Hatred," (319.2) which enables them to practively go after hate sites. One such example was the site, "Western Canada for Us." Many members of the group had previous criminal records for violent crimes. The site was based in Edmonton, the ISP was in New Jersey, and the links to other well-known white supremacist groups internationally.

Interesting discussion of the chronology of the investigation, which only began with online monitoring and then shifted to traditional, on-the-ground investigative tools.

Wrap Up: "Human rights, human dignity and mutual respect are the building blocks of the Unit." Refreshing law enforcement perspective.

Online investigations recommended as effective and economical tools.

National High Tech Crime Center, Amsterdam

Running late this morning from my apartment to the ADL conference, due to the lack of 6 train service and the complete absence of any available cabs. That said, got here in time to catch the end of the first presentation on the panel this morning.

Pascal Hetzscholdt, of the Naitonal High Tech Crime Center, Amsterdamis making an impressive presentation with lots of flash animation examples of high tech, racist online games.

He made a good point about the lack of IT-saavy people to investigate high tech crimes.

INACH Conference @ ADL

Conference at the ADL Thursday, 9/29 and Friday, 9/30 sponsored by the International Network against Cyber Hate .

The focus on Thursday was primarily on law enforcement aspects of how to address various aspects of hate via internet.


Brian Marcus, of ADL, has been key putting this whole thing together and he did a nice job of introducing the problem online to an audience that may not have been familiar with some of it. Consistent with ADL's mission, the presentation focuses on both far-right and other kinds of terrorism (such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah). I understand this approach, but have some concerns about it.


Interesting presentations by Christopher Wolf, Michael Gennaco (who prosecuted the Machado case), Peter Rodrigues (from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam), and Brian Levin (Cal State, San Bernardino).


Peter Rodrigues, as the lone non-American voice on the panel made a crucial point, I think, about the fact that most of these hate sites though illegal in the Netherlands are legal in the U.S. It seems to me this point is the heart of the issue and was little discussed.

Back after Haitus

After a haitus in August and most of September, I'm back to blogging here.

Repressive Tolerance

The visit to the NY Tolerance Center yesterday and the escalating subway searches here, have me thinking about the relationship between tolerance, fascism and civil liberties.

In 1965, Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay called "Repressive Tolerance." I really like this bit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: . . . it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: “fire.” It is a situation in which the total catastrophy could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

There is a way in which "tolerance" as some sort of content-free concept, set apart from any sort of socio-political context becomes, like patriotism, the last refuge of scoundrels. I think that an understanding of "tolerance" that equates the terrorist acts of 9/11, which were attacks against a super power with attacks against minority group members, falls into what a misuse of the very notion of tolerance and becomes, what Marcuse terms, repressive tolerance, a perversion of tolerance:

The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men [sic] immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.

True in 1965, still true in 2005.

Monday is Tolerance Day

Last Monday I was delighted to meet with Brian Marcus, Director of Internet Monitoring at the ADL . They are doing some amazing work there, and Brian has, quite possibly, the world's coolest job. Brian is also the liaison to the INACH, and I was gratified to learn that the organization is active, vital and meeting in New York City at the end of September.

This Monday (today), I'm scheduled to visit the new New York Tolerance Center . Of course, I'm especially interested in their Globalhate.com part of the exhibit.

Hate Crime in NYC, 2000-2004

Interesting piece in the NYTimes about hate crime from Sunday. It's short, and the URL will expire, so I include the entire text here:

Breaking Down Hate Crime

By JO CRAVEN McGINTY

When a group of white men attacked three black men on the streets of Howard Beach, Queens, last month, severely beating one with a baseball bat, it was the 125th hate crime in New York this year, according to records collected by the Police Department.

The attack echoed an assault from nearly 20 years earlier when another group of white men armed with bats chased three black men through the same neighborhood, causing the death of one victim, who ran in front of a car while trying to escape.
In one notable difference, two suspects in the latest attack have been charged with first-degree assault as a hate crime — a provision that did not exist in New York until the Hate Crimes Act of 2000. That law, for the first time, allowed harsher sentences for criminals who single out victims because of personal traits like sexual orientation, race or religion. As a result, these suspects, if convicted, would face a minimum penalty of eight years in prison — compared with a five-year minimum for regular assault.

Since 2000, the city’s 23-member Hate Crimes Task Force has investigated nearly 2,000 crimes and determined that 95 percent of them were motivated by hate, including 20 percent that involved physical attacks.

But, like all crime, hate crimes have decreased, dropping 44 percent from 2000 through 2004, with physical attacks decreasing by nearly half.

Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood of the Hate Crimes Task Force attributed the trend to several factors: The Hate Crimes Act, which he said put people on notice; the existence of the task force, which has operated since 1980; and the resolution of high-profile hate crimes, including the first Howard Beach attacks; the 1989 shooting death of a black teenager in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; and the 1991 stabbing death of a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

“There’s been a modification of human behavior in New York over the last 10 or 12 years,” Inspector Osgood said. “People are just behaving better in the city.”

The article also includes a couple of decent graphics, but blogger didn't seem to want to load those, so you'll have to track those down yourself if you want to see them.

This bit of reporting on hate crimes interesting for a few reasons. First of all, it's framed around the most recent Howard Beach incident which is getting a lot of press locally, while another hate crime that happened just days before and left the victim in much worse condition, is not getting much press at all. The difference? The incident *not* getting much coverage was an intraracial, homophobic incident. The incident in Howard Beach features a big, beefy white guy who, frankly, just looks the part of hate crime perp. Secondly, I find the complete absence of any mention of the Internet noteworthy. On the face of it, one could say that as Internet participation in hate groups goes up, hate crimes are simultaneously trending in the other direction. Correlation, I know, not causation, but interesting nevertheless. And, the distinction between hate online and hate crimes is an important one to keep in mind, and one that is lost in much of the literature on hate. Finally, the patterns of hate crimes in the city are interesting. According to the article, the majority of hate crimes are anti-semitic and occur in the Brooklyn's 61st precinct, home of the largest Hasidic neighborhood, Borough Park. This makes me wonder if there is a greater likelihood of reporting bias crimes in this community, or if the incidents are, in fact, actually higher there. If they are, then this raises questions about the relative safety of 'enclave' neighborhoods, such as Borough Park.