The Web fuels hate speech

By Christopher Wolf

Thursday, November 15, 2007

BERLIN:

Thursday, Nov. 8th was a depressing, cold and drizzly night in Berlin. Fitting weather for the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the government-sanctioned night of terror against Jews in 1938 that was a major step towards the Holocaust.

Earlier that day, almost seven decades after Kristallnacht, human rights experts from around the world gathered in a reconstructed synagogue in Berlin's Mitte district to discuss a resurgence of anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance. The group observed that the most numerous attacks on Jews and other minorities are now coming in the form of Internet hate speech broadcast worldwide.