CUKIERMAN CALLS ON U.S. TO SUPPORT OUTLAWING OF INTERNET ON-LINE HATRED

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier told the participants that the increase in acts motivated by intolerance in France showed that preventive measures, while necessary, were not enough.


“We have to be able to act directly against those that commit these crimes,” he said. “On our own territory, we have decided to take measures against these activities, by toughening the laws dealing with crimes motivated by racism, anti-Semitism or xenophobia, by holding Internet providers responsible for their sites, and by systematically searching for hate speech in the media."


“However, one State can only do so much. The Internet does not have any boundaries. The OSCE must become an 'observatory to identify and help propagate best practices, and, based on this work, it must also act as a 'laboratory' where, for example, a code of conduct could be developed,” the French Foreign Minister said.


The OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, also urged the Organization's participating States to make it clear that they were serious about tackling hate speech on the Internet.


“They should undertake measures to strengthen international co-operation and mutual assistance between law enforcement authorities to ensure that effective action can be taken against the dissemination of racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic material via the Internet,” he said.


At the same time, Passy cautioned against over-regulating the “incredible diversity provided by the Internet or limiting the free exchange of ideas and information."
“The best approach is self-regulation or co-regulation, through developing codes of conduct, and through increasing users' and providers' awareness and sensitivity to the problem,” he added.


The Chairman-in-Office also urged the OSCE to increase its efforts to reach out to young people in order to improve their understanding of the need for tolerance.


Addressing the conference, CRIF's Roger Cukierman said, "All those who consider racism an unbearable violence should to be concerned with what is happening on the Internet. In the past years, one could see the multiplication of the number of racist and anti-Semitic websites because violent groups know how to use efficiently the Web."

"Groups of various sizes who were on the decline in Europe, in the United States and in the Arab world did find a second wind thanks to their websites. This means a real rebirth for some groups given the amount of connection to their pages. However, the Net did not invent propaganda and did not create those groups. One obviously does not reach automatically the pages displayed by the Ku Klux Klan on the abbc.com Islamic site or the violently anti-Arab pages of the French racist SOS Scum website. To find them, one must want to get there. Nevertheless, those sites are easy to find because the Web search engines reference them.

"Racist and anti-Semitic sites can be read and everyone should know what could be seen there. Several examples are available and show the dangerousness of the phenomenon, most of the readers and victims being young websurfers

"One should know about those websites listing the names of anti-racist militants, journalists, artists and unionists "to be assassinated"; one should see the atrocious images displayed by the neo-Nazi sites calling for hatred and violence.

"One must also speak about the Islamic websites. Several hundred of those sites explain at length how idolatrous Jews and Christians corrupted the word of God (the Koran). In fact, there is a mad multiplication of anti-American and anti-Semitic diatribes. Jihad (Holy War) is proclaimed and encouraged. The authors sanctify the suicide killers and call them martyrs. Jihad is an obligation to all Muslims and not an adult and mature choice, they say. Moreover, the aggressiveness towards the United States and Europe justify the attacks against them and even expect them.

"One should now perceive the threat looming over the United States and Europe. Those racist and anti-Semitic texts supporting terrorist attacks will not remain without an effect; they get people worked up and feed an implacable hatred towards the Western world.

"I must say that the propagation of those illegal writings is now in tune with the times, so to speak. This has inexorably become part of our virtual landscape. In this case, permissiveness is fed by the defection of those who on the political scene could have stepped forward to speak against this trend. How should we take the permissive attitude of some countries where racism seems to be regarded as an opinion and who oppose any regulation of the Internet? Those countries should do some soul searching instead of hiding behind the freedom of speech shield. We do say that defending freedom of speech does not mean tolerating that Internet should become a bottomless sewer into which everything could be poured. The United States are a model in the struggle against all kinds of fanaticism; they ought to consider anti-Semitism and racism the same way they consider pedophilia; they should not be opposing the 1st amendment to the fight against those offences. American friends, do not disappoint us!

"Clearly enough, it is essential to fight against racism and anti-Semitism without any possible compromise. It is important to state and proclaim that racism and anti-Semitism are unbearable on the Internet, in spite of the temporary difficulties to achieve concrete results.

"In order to help concretizing those results, CRIF suggests (…) the creation of an OSCE Internet observatory in charge of listing the problems to enable a more efficient struggle against on-line hatred," concluded Roger Cukierman.

In the course of the conference, CRIF's Marc Knobel and CEJI, the European Jewish Information Center, co-organized a session devoted to anti-Semitic propaganda over Arab Satellite TV channels. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, violently anti-Semitic programs are broadcast over those channels and beamed all over the Middle East and Western Europe thanks mostly to the French satellite network Eutelsat. A draft law presented to the French National Assembly in February 2004, which should be adopted this summer, would compel the Arab TV companies to abide by French laws regarding racism and anti-Semitism. CRIF and CEJI encouraged the European Union to draft a law on TV and Radio communication preventing the broadcast of anti-Semitic and racist programs.

The event was the second in a series of three OSCE meetings this year focusing on tolerance and anti-discrimination. The series will be concluded in September at an international conference in Brussels on tolerance and the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination.