14 DAY TRIAL // Hate crimes over the Internet are very seldom followed by a court decision in Canada, that's why the ruling yesterday caused a bit of a stir. Discrimination is not new on the web, it has been there when there were only a few sites and it will always be one of the major causes for grief. Moreover, people claiming to be better than others based on skin color are plain crazy, I think: the amount of melanin in your epidermis does not have anything to do with the way the brain works, or with anything else for that matter.
Keith Francis William (Bill) Noble, 31, is the classic example of his category. A police statement wrote that he did "willfully promote hatred against identifiable groups, namely Jews, Blacks, homosexual or gay persons, non-whites and persons of mixed race or ethnic origin." That's a lot of hate harbored in just one person.
He was sentenced to four months in jail and, after that, he is not to touch a computer for three years, due to his fervent activity on white supremacist websites, making it easier for the police to identify him and later to raid his former home in Ford St. John, a rural community. The trial lasted for two weeks and, as I mentioned earlier, the ruling is surprising. "The conviction rate for Internet-related crimes is very low," Sergeant Sean McGowan told AFP. "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," he continued.
A moral matter was before the court, whether to censor the man or let him be, just to continue his anti-"everybody else that's not like him" propaganda. Perhaps somebody should tell Bill that supremacists have never got their way. Not "white supremacists, black supremacists, yellow supremacists, blue supremacists? especially the blue ones," as Eddie Izzard, a famous comedian once said.