Chicago-area attack in '99
Little study has been done on the extent to which the Web inspires real-world crime, but Brian Marcus, director of Internet monitoring with the Anti-Defamation League in New York, said cyber hate motivated Benjamin Smith, a Wilmette man who shot his way across Illinois and Indiana in 1999.
He targeted blacks, Jews and Asians, killing two people and wounding nine before committing suicide.
"[Smith] even said in an interview that it was through the Internet that he discovered the World Church of the Creator," Marcus said, referring to an Illinois group now called the Creativity Movement. "And then in July 1999 he goes on a real-world, multistate killing spree."
The violence is not limited to the United States.
British and Polish journalists and human-rights activists have demanded their governments shut down two allied hate sites called Redwatch. The sites publish "enemies lists" with home addresses, and they have been blamed for egging on violence by the far right.
British journalist Peter Lazenby, a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post, found his photographs and former address posted on the British version of Redwatch, which maintains three Web addresses on U.S. servers.
After Redwatch posted its blacklist, a thug stabbed a trade union leader in the face outside his home last year, and two schoolteachers' home and car were firebombed in 2003.
"The government says because these sites are based in the United States and [because of] your 1st Amendment, nothing can be done," Lazenby said from Leeds, England. "Well, they certainly manage to shut down pedophile sites and arrest the people behind them."
Redwatch says it doesn't encourage violence and was created in response to leftists' attacks on white nationalists.
"We consider Marxists and Capitalists as traitors and they will face the people's courts someday to pay for their crimes," Redwatch said in an online statement.
In Warsaw, authorities have struggled to shut down the U.S.-hosted, Polish-language Redwatch. The site promotes the message of the Creativity Movement, which formed in Illinois and has long included Chicago Polish neo-Nazis.
A multilingual Web site established by a Cicero man continues to sell literature and raise money for the man's defense even though he was deported to Germany in 2005 to serve a prison term for Holocaust denial.
In 1995, the man, a German citizen named Germar Rudolf, registered a site for the Belgian Foundation Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (Free Historical Research). Pressured by authorities there, he moved his publishing operation to England and then New York. The site is now hosted on a Texas server.
A former chemist, Rudolf wrote a 1993 report in Germany that disputed the Nazi gassing of Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He was convicted of inciting racial hatred and fled, eventually entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico, federal officials said.
'The cost of this freedom'
Karl Zimmerman?-whose Steadfast Networks in Chicago has hosted as many as 17 hate sites, according to the Anti-Defamation League?-said there are only two Web sites he knows of that have drawn several complaints, although some companies that are customers may host other sites.
Zimmerman said that as long as the content is legal, Steadfast doesn't enter into a debate about the content.
"Yes, there will be cases where we don't agree with what is said, but that is the cost of this freedom," Zimmerman said Monday in an e-mail.
One of the most prolific hosts of foreign racist sites is Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Neb., a former Chicago resident who claims to head the American branch of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Lauck, who spent time in a German prison for racial hatred, hosts about 80 German, Swedish and other foreign Web sites.
Clients often approach Lauck through anonymous e-mails, so that even he doesn't know their identity.
"We'll say, 'OK, in the future, all you do is send an envelope with some Euro bank notes in it and say this is for Web site XYZ,' " Lauck said.
One client is the Danish National Socialist Movement. While the Nazi party is legal there, it asked Lauck to host its backup Web site.
"We had an attack by left-wings a short while ago," said party leader Jonni Hansen, "and our Web hosting by Lauck rescued us, because we were thrown out of the Danish Web server."
Stormfront White Nationalist Community, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., is the giant of international Web hate sites. It hosts discussion groups in 20 languages and boasts more than 111,000 members.
Spokesman Jamie Kelso portrays Stormfront as simply a white-interests organization, not unlike those that lobby for blacks or Latinos.
But Stormfront members exchange racial slurs and cheer on violent video of Russian skinheads beating up minorities.
Kelso said it's clear why the site draws foreigners.
"No other country has a 1st Amendment," he said. "In Canada, where we're very big, you can be jailed for what's called hate speech. You can be jailed and fined and sanctioned. Same thing in Germany."
The connections of the Rami-oriented Radio Islam to Chicago are as obscure as the link to Rami, the Swedish-Moroccan founder of the radio program. The site is held by a Mohamed William, but a letter to the Chicago post office box went unanswered.
Whether he is behind Radio Islam, Rami is delighted with the site?-and the potential of the Web.
"The Internet is more free," he said. "It's difficult to control. The Internet is a fantastic revolution in the modern times."
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