A small town in British Columbia is at the centre of a controversy in Europe, because of a group of racists who use a website to promote their views. French police have arrested 13 members of the group in an effort to shut down the website.
French TV pointed the finger at Canada following the arrests of a group of Nazis and so-called "Satanists" who are charged with threats of violence against Jews.
The Canadian connection is a website run by the Charlemagne Hammer Skinheads, which has blatantly anti-semitic content. At one point it says: "the six million...the Holocaust...the gas chambers... what a joke."
The link to Canada is the computer where the data is held at "Ftcnet." That's Fairview Technology in the little town of Oliver, in southern B.C. Fairview is the Internet provider for, among others, a variety of anti-Semitic Websites.
One calls Adolf Hitler "our hero."
So far, it's all legal under Canadian law. But a lot of people in Oliver wish it was not because their town is being labelled as a centre of hate.
The owner of Fairview, Bernard Klatt, responded by e-mail saying, "I'm in the business of Internet access, I'm not in the business of denying access to the Internet...I don't see why I should discriminate against people who want to express their viewpoints."
In fact, most of the material on these sites doesn't originate in Oliver at One, for example, comes from a white-power group called the Canadian Patriots network run by Marc Lemire of Toronto.
A hate-crimes unit is checking hundreds of pages of Internet material for breaches of the Criminal Code which bans the promotion of hate. Vancouver Police say it could take months, and they're not even sure where, exactly, all of the data is physically stored.
