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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Are white supremacists and anti-Semites using the Net to recruit upscale followers?
Jul 8, 1999 | Is the Internet somehow to blame -- again? The murderous racist rampage by Benjamin Nathaniel Smith last weekend has reopened the question of the role of the Internet in promoting hate -- and even hate crimes -- among impressionable youths.
News reports note that Smith -- who killed two and injured nine before killing himself during a three-day, two-state shooting spree -- was a former member of a white supremacist group that calls itself the World Church of the Creator. The group, which has more than 40 chapters across the country, has built up its membership online, advocating a racial holy war. Its leader, 27-year-old Matt Hale, runs the group from his parents' home in East Peoria, Ill.
According to such monitoring groups as Hatewatch and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the loose-knit organization is among the fastest-growing hate groups in the country, with several hundred active members and thousands more who pay electronic visits to the "church" and its dozens of affiliated Web sites.
There's no evidence directly linking Hale's group to Smith's shooting spree, but critics argue that while its violent anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment, the World Church of the Creator not only promotes hate but incites violence.
Web sites like the one run by the World Church of the Creator -- usually found at www.creator.org, it has not been accessible during the reporting of this story -- appear to be shaping a new, upscale cadre of white supremacists extending even to tony New England prep schools.
As Don Black, the ex-con and computer whiz who runs the white supremacist Stormfront.org site (which was also inaccessible during the reporting of this story), told USA Weekend on March 28: "We're not trailer-trash people with bad teeth or high school dropouts. We are not illiterate, unsophisticated people." (Black declined to answer e-mail and phone requests for a Salon Technology interview.)
"What the Net does for the [supremacist] movement is amplify its propaganda and recruiting reach," says Mark Potok, the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Watch. "It's the perfect venue for recruiting middle-class and upper-middle-class young people. They're looking for those kids to build a political movement and a revolution."
For those kids and young adults drawn to these Web sites -- and the people who run them -- the Internet can offer new vistas of hate. But Web surfers aren't turned into hate-mongers overnight.
There was no instant conversion for 16-year-old Alice (not her actual name). She says she grew up in an affluent household; both her parents graduated from Harvard. Today she attends a ritzy Northeastern prep school. But this curious teenager has a worldview that is likely to be radically different from that of many of her classmates.
