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A Canadian court handed down a rare conviction to a
white supremacist for posting hate material on the Internet, police
here said Tuesday.
A judge ruled that Keith Francis
William (Bill) Noble, 31, did "willfully promote hatred against
identifiable groups, namely Jews, Blacks, homosexual or gay persons,
non-whites and persons of mixed race or ethnic origin," said a
police statement.
Noble was sentenced to four
months in jail, plus restrictions on his use of computers for three
years, said the police statement. He was charged after police raided
his former home in the rural community of Fort St. John.
Monday's conviction by the
British Columbia Supreme Court in western Canada, following a
two-week trial last fall, is unusual, Sergeant Sean McGowan told AFP.
"The conviction rate for Internet-related crimes is very
low."
"This is the second
conviction of an individual for hate propaganda in British Columbia,
and there have been only four or five cases in all of Canada where
an individual has been prosecuted and convicted for hate over the
Internet," said McGowan.
McGowan said police were tipped
off about Noble's posting by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center For Holocaust Studies, an international human rights
organization.
Nobel "posted quite a bit on
a lot of white supremacist websites," said McGwan. "The
content of the website and the content of what he posted were
offensive enough to meet a high standard."
Noble "was known to the
police, the authorities, and to our organization," said David
Eisenstadt, a spokesman for the Wiesenthal organization.
"We're pleased this
(conviction) has happened, not because we condone censorship but
because there's a lot of abuse on the Internet," Eisenstadt
told AFP. "There are no boundaries on the Internet."
 --AFP
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