Internet creates proliferation of hate sites: Adler

Internet creates proliferation of hate sites: Adler

Neal Hall, CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, August 11, 2007

Article tools

* Printer friendly

* E-mail

Font:

* *

* *

* *

* *

VANCOUVER -- The Internet has created a proliferation of hate sites that promote racial discrimination and allow the hate mongers "direct marketing" of their message to the YouTube generation, Toronto criminal lawyer Leo Adler said Friday.

"Ten years ago, there was only one site," said Adler, who is also the director of national affairs for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.

"Last year, we found 6,000 and now it's jumped to 7,000 sites," he said.

Some sites create racist video-style games to entice children, Adler said, using his computer to demonstrate a game called Border Patrol that allows the viewer to shoot Mexicans trying to cross the border into the U.S. -- they scream and blood spurts as they are shot.

He showed another game where a suicide bomber walks along the street while the player makes him explode in a pool of blood, racking up points by taking out men, women and children walking along a busy street.

"We do this presentation not to glorify but to make people aware," Adler said.

Adler said children doing a Google search often stumble onto sites that are disguised as promoting freedom of speech.

Last year, a girl in Burlington, Ont., went to such a site run by a neo-Nazi and became convinced the Holocaust never happened, and she went on to convince some of her classmates, Adler said.

Adler also played one of the training videos for suicide bombers available on YouTube, showing a middle-class woman saying goodbye to her young son while holding a detonator device in her hands.

He said the Internet also provides information on how to build a bomb -- the same information used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 -- and how to use a celphone as a detonator.

This is the dark side of the Internet, Adler said, as he unveiled a new CD Rom called Digital Terrorism: Hate on Demand, which shows how extremist groups harness the power of the Internet. It's a joint project of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Canadian Friends of the centre.

"We don't want censorship," Adler said. "We're not in favour of censorship."

He said his group informs web servers, asking for offensive Internet sites to be removed, or reports them to police.