Monitor: US comment on the Internet's influence following Benjamin Smith's shooting spree

All the News of the World

AFTER SMITH'S horrifying shooting spree, Americans are traumatized once again by racist violence. Blame it on Hale. Yes, Smith did the shooting. And there will be those who want to solely blame the actual killer, as though he were some meteor falling from the sky and not infected by the hatred around him. But Smith's sick story reads like a typical case history of the alienated American white male who's in trouble with the law and going nowhere. He meets a guru - in this case the race-baiting Hale - and devotes himself to a cause he believes gives meaning to his life: racial identity. And when the cause inevitably fails to pacify his inner demons, he explodes. Hale's probably sweating out some legal liability for Smith's killing spree, and that's great. Let him sweat.

The Journal Gazette, Indiana

SMITH WAS a member of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group. The group's repulsive Web pages confirm the contention of one expert that "this is a religion for and by sociopaths". The Internet has given groups like this increased visibility - indeed, its would-be fuhrer, Matt Hale, has already become a media celebrity, appearing yesterday on NBC's Today show. Hale's group has only a few hundred members. Without the Web, those few hundred people might have remained solitary creeps. The Net has given them a false sense of community. As the stock-pickers go wild and the values of Web businesses continue to soar, the story of Smith is a sobering reminder that some of this new medium's users are using it solely for evil.

New York Post

THE FIRST Amendment demands that the nation's haters be allowed to hold and express their views. But that doesn't require others to be silent against them. People like Hale exist at the margins of society. Yet his ideas are met with embarrassed silence or a genteel collective shushing; the effect is to tolerate his ideas. That in turn emboldens foot soldiers to take the next step. The nation can speak louder against hate. Raise up now that voice.

USA Today