Those wacky german censors, Ashcroft, and other latent nazis

[Major Variola (ret)]

NEW YORK  A German United Nations employee who admitted scratching
anti-Semitic graffiti on a Jewish neighbor's door and setting it afire
was indicted Thursday on arson and other charges as hate crimes.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27686-2002Jan10.html
......

BERLIN -- German Interior Minister Otto Schily, an energetic campaigner
against U.S.-based neo-Nazi websites, has asked U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft for help in his fight.

Specifically, Schily asked Ashcroft during one of their recent
face-to-face meetings to exert pressure on an American Internet service
provider to block a site with an official-sounding German name that
currently diverts traffic to a neo-Nazi site.

As of Wednesday, anyone clicking on www.bundesinnenministerium.com will
end up looking not at content supplied by Schily's office, the German
Interior Ministry, but at a site run by Gerhard Lauck of Nebraska,
dubbed by some the "Farmbelt Fuehrer" because of his enthusiasm for
Hitler.


"We contacted the provider and asked him to put down that site,
www.bundesinnenministerium.com," said Dirk Inger, Schily's spokesman.
"They said a lot of things. First they said they had to check it, then
they said they would do it. Then they said they would check it again.
But nothing happened."

So, said Inger, Schily asked Ashcroft for his help when the two men met
twice last month, once in Washington and once in Berlin, to discuss the
war on terrorism.

"It was constructive," said Inger. "It's difficult, of course, because
of your legislation and the First Amendment of the Constitution."

The German Interior Ministry has also contacted the German Embassy in
Washington and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, asking both to lobby the ISP
directly. It also approached the United Nations Domain Name Dispute
Resolution Service.

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