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Today's Paper | May 07, 2024

Published 21 Jul, 2003 12:00am

Anti-Muslim,anti-Arab websites flourishing

PARIS, July 20: French anti-racist organisation MRAP has issued a report severely condemning what it refers to as “a new alliance between the (traditional) extreme Right and other extremists proclaiming themselves to represent Judaism.”

The report named “The birth of a new extreme Right on the Internet” which is based on a two-year study of anti-Arab websites on the Internet, points to the existence of several websites, notably “sos-racaille” (sos-scum), and also a service provider, Liberty-web.net, registered in the US, as being at the center of a large network of such sites that “do not hide their anti-Arab racism, or their Islamophobia.”

Some of the sites go so far as to call for the murder of Arabs or the destruction of Muslim places of worship, says the study, with others taking potshots at journalists and other opinion-makers considered as being too pro-Arab or pro-Muslim.

Even worse, notes the report, it is very hard to control the phenomenon for “all of the websites have been registered under false names and false addresses,” although according to an MRAP source, all hark back to the “same group of individuals.”

As for the Liberty-web.net website, the MRAP notes that it serves as a cover for an assortment of anti-Arab causes, which include Neo-Nazis, European Nationalists, others considered as being close to the Israeli extreme Right, and include such French-nationality sites as “aipj.net” and “amisraelhai.org.”

The report also deplores the fact that none of the complaints that MRAP has filed have ever been taken seriously by the French judicial system, because of “a lack of a political willingness” by the French government to see the individuals behind the system actually brought to trial, although MRAP affirms that by its own means it has been able to identify members of the various networks behind the phenomenon.

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