Sharp Rise in Web Hate Sites
Human rights group reports hate sites on the Internet have
grown
almost 60 percent.
By June Preston, Reuters
February 24, 1999 8:09 AM PT
ATLANTA -- The Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups are
increasingly spreading hate messages via the Internet and
shifting their target audience from street thugs to college-bound
teens, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Tuesday.
The Montgomery, Alabama-based center, a human rights organization
that tracks hate groups and their activities, said hate sites on
the Internet had grown by nearly 60 percent, from 163 in 1997 to
254 at the end of 1998.
Nearly half of the more than 500 racist groups operating across
the United States are using Internet sites to spread their
messages, it said in a report.
"It has become the propaganda venue of choice," law
center spokesman Mark Potok told Reuters. "It allows
Klansmen who a few years ago could reach only 100 people with a
poorly produced pamphlet to reach an audience in the
millions."
Cheap way to spread hate Potok said the Southern Poverty Law
Center had also noted a shift in the demographics of the target
audience for the white supremacist message.
'[The Net] has become the propaganda venue of choice.' -- Mark
Potok, spokesman for Southern Poverty Law Center
"The movement is interested not so much in developing street
thugs who beat up people in bars but college-bound teens who live
in middle-class and upper-class homes," Potok said.
"It is also cheap and you don't need to be literate,"
Potok said of the Internet. "You can steal your text from
other sites."
The law center's report identified 537 U.S. hate groups, up from
474 the year before. The number of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan
groups grew by nearly 40 percent, increasing from 227 to 314, the
report said.
Of the 537 active U.S. hate groups in 1998, 163 were Klan
organizations, up from 127 the year before; 151 were neo-Nazi
groups, up from 100; 48 were Skinhead groups, up from 42 in 1997
and 29 were black separatist groups, compared to 12 a year
earlier.
"The growth of racial hatred is not merely hatred by whites
of blacks. There are other inter-ethnic hatreds, blacks resenting
Hispanics and black supremacists who hate a number of other
groups," Potok said.
Sites play on fear The vast majority of hate groups, however, are
made up of whites, he said.
"Virtually all of the white supremacist movement feels
America is being overwhelmed by dark hordes from across our
borders," Potok said.
"They play much on fears of whites becoming a minority. They
are looking to blame others for their troubles, for everything
from losing a union job to losing children in a divorce
settlement," he said. "There's a lot of scapegoating
going on."
Potok said a few hate movements actually declined in numbers in
1998, including Christian Identity, which saw a drop in
congregations from 81 to 62 in a year marked by an extensive
search for one of its practitioners, Eric Rudolph.
Rudolph is believed to have planted a bomb that killed a police
officer and maimed a nurse at an Alabama abortion clinic.
The Christian Identity movement opposes abortion. It holds that
whites are God's chosen people and must prepare for a race war.
The law center report said Aryan Nations lost four chapters as
followers of leader Richard Butler, 81, drifted away.
Aryan Nations has been one of the most notorious U.S. hate groups
for the past two decades, with adherents accused of committing
crimes ranging from armored car robberies to murder, including
more than 20 bank robberies staged to finance a white supremacist
revolution.
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