You have to be taught how to hate. Everybody hates somebody sometime. Bertrand Russell described it as one of those quirky requirements for happiness – to qualify as a human being, you have to hate some other person, nation or creed. It comes naturally, and sometimes you don’t need any particular reason at all. You just hate him – that bloke over there who “borrows” your copy of The Mirror. Or that woman who brings pastrami for lunch. It all starts in the playground, where we boisterously reject our teachers’ twittering on about brotherly love. Backbiting, prejudice, racism, misogyny, xenophobia and spurnful contempt of anyone a teensy bit different is the typical sentiment that starts anything from a brawl to a world war.
When you’re fed up with hate sites, where can you go? Complaining to ISPs doesn’t always work. America Online, which has shut down members’ Web sites deemed offensive or pornographic, claimed it couldn’t close the Ku Klux Klan site. This decision is mainly based on the US’s First Amendment – AOL said it couldn’t close the site because it was “simply informational” and wasn’t “hateful or inciteful”. If you’re feeling frustrated, join the anti-hate campaigns at:
HateWatch (http://hatewatch.org), a non-profit organisation that monitors the growing and evolving threat of hate group activity on the Internet.
Hate Page of the Week http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~efx/hpotw.html
Claims that after highlighting the Christian Nationalist Homepage, the site was closed. “In short this means that one of most visible sites disseminating tons of racist literature is gone,” hurrahs Frank Placencia. He says racism and anti-Semitism are the greatest threat to democracy. “It’s not only US whites – I’ve found hate pages maintained by people in Spain who hate Arabs, Germans maligning Jews, and blacks against blacks. There’s a great deal to be done before we can live in peace.”
Brillo e-zine offers a hit list of pages to spam at http://www.virago-net.com/brillo/No1/hitlist.htm. “We urge to visit the sites, decide whether or not the material there is offensive, and then let the creators know that this is not acceptable.”
Jeff Donels, Web master of The Right Side of the Web (http://www.rtside.com/), e-mailed me to say he objects to having his pages being categorised as a “hate site”. “Any rational human being would conclude that my site has nothing to do with hate. It has to do with mainstream, main street conservative politics. Of course, many left-wing extremists call it hate, because as a favorite bumper sticker of mine says, `a bigot is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal’. This is particularly strange, since a great deal of my website last year was devoted to a Republican candidate for President who happens to be an African-American, Alan Keyes, who is someone who would hardly be welcome on a ‘hate site’.” Donels says he’s had problems with activists trying to destroy his site. “Hackers have attacked and put obscene messages and pictures on there, which does not make progressive politics look very pretty.” Net users have also complained to his ISP and demanded that his pages be removed. “Only a couple of brainless ones have tried this. I get quite a bit of hate mail, too, and I post it on the site to embarass the senders, for all to see. It is probably the most popular page on my site.” As for censorship on the Net, Donels is understandably against it. “I oppose it because left-wingers will just use it to get rid of all opposing points of view.”
Operation Rescue Nation (ORN, http://web2.airmail.net/~orn/), has been labelled as perpetuating “rabid misogyny and religious zealotry” by pro-choicers. We asked one of the group’s members invovled with the site, Ron Mackey, of what he thought about ORN being lumped in a group of “hate sites”?
“To the contrary, to be willing to give up everything in order to confront people who are doing wrong, that is the true meaning of love and not hate,” Mackey says. “The abortionists and women going into the clinics are murderers. If you look at the unborn from a scientific view, with a heart beat and brain waves, they are living beings with, in some cases, a different blood type than the mother. Only the extremely uneducated will disagree.” He says his home page has been getting an average of about 20 hits a day during the past year. As a precaution against hackers, the site is set up on “a very secure server”. “Besides our provider’s backups, I also have the site backed up on two different computers. I get about two hate e-mails daily. Each one I receive is obviously from someone filled with hate. They have so much anger because they have almost always been a part of a murder themselves and they feel very guilty over their sin.” As for censorship on the Net, Mackey says: “If any laws were passed to censor the Internet, I am sure the government would come after our home page.”
