[2770] in Depressing_Thoughts
"Anti-Semitism Found on Large Computer Network" (from Jewish Advocate)
rnewman@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (rnewman@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Feb 11 18:49:16 1992
from The Jewish Advocate (a Boston weekly), 2/7/92:
Anti-Semitism Found on Large Computer Network
by Garth Wolkoff, Northern California Jewish Bulletin
Late last year, U.C. Berkeley graduate student David Kaim logged
onto a school computer network. He heard that by pressing a few
buttons, he could access job listings, buy a bicycle, read movie
reviews and communicate with students at schools around the country.
He found all that--but he also was stunned to discover screen
after screen of anti-Semitic material, mostly entries describing how
the Holocaust was a gross exaggeration by a Jewish or Zionist
conspiracy and that Jews should apologize to David Duke for defaming
his character.
Kaim had tapped into Internet, a computer network that connects up
to five million scientists, researchers, students, and other academics
around the world; in the Bay Area alone it is used by tens of
thousands of students every day.
Other Jewish students involved with Berkeley Hillel told Kaim they
had noticed the entries. So had Giovanni Paoletti, who works for a
computer company in Silicon Valley and attends Temple Beth David in
Saratoga, as did many of Paoletti's friends who work at computer
companies in the area.
In fact, addresses and phone numbers where computer subscribers
can buy or obtain Holocaust-revisionist material and other
anti-Semitic texts are being posted on the Internet network with
alarming frequency.
"There never have been any proofs that Jews murder gentile
children to use their blood for matzah. There have never been any
proofs that Germans murdered Jews and used their fat to manufacture
hand soap," read one transmission from Oregon in September, an excerpt
from a Bradley Smith tract titled "Confessions of a Holocaust
Revisionist."
Some of the anti-Semitic material on Internet, which runs the
gamut from Jewish media conspiracy theories to the reproduction of
Holocaust-revisionist literature, originates in Oregon; a fax number
often included for more information has that state's area code.
Other transmissions collected by Kaim have come from the San Jose
area; Amherst, Mass.; New Jersey's Rutgers University; and an
unspecified branch of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
In Berkeley, the Hillel plans to respond to Kaim's complaint,
according to director Beverly Pinto. But no specific legal action
is planned, she said, since the university's policies on computer
expression are quite general.
Interestingly, Kaim's complaints come on the heels of a November
controversy involving the Berkeley student newspaper's refusal to
print a Holocaust-revisionist advertisement by the same Bradley Smith
whose "Confessions" were quoted on the computer network.
The discovery of the anti-Semitic material also comes after the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith successfully persuaded Prodigy,
a private computer network based in New York, to censure [sic]
anti-Semitic transmissions.
But according to Jack Cohen of the ADL's Central Pacific Region,
unless Internet has a policy of censoring material, his agency won't
ask the network to stop the anti-Semitic electronic mail.
"We don't advocate censorship," Cohen said. "We encourage
Internet subscribers to use their subscription power, their keyboard
power, to register their own objections to this perversion of computer
technology.
