WIESENTHAL CENTER PRAISES UK HOME OFFICE FOR BOLD
INITIATIVE TO THWART PRO-TERRORIST WEBSITES

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the international Jewish human rights NGO which pioneered the monitoring the use of the Internet by terrorist and hate groups, lauded the British Home Office for including websites that promote terrorism and violence in the UK as grounds for deportation of non-UK citizens.

"We commend the British authorities for publishing rules that will put an immediate damper on the targeted recruitment of young UK Muslims by Islamist extremists," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

"We applaud the Home Office for including ‘running a website’ that would ‘foment, justify, glorify terrorist violence…provoke others to terrorist acts…foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.’" Cooper continued. "We laud this important initiative and we hope it becomes a model for other democratic societies in the struggle to thwart the recruitment efforts of pro-terrorist groups and hate organizations.

In the past eight years, the Wiesenthal Center has shared findings from its annual Digital Terror and Hate CD-ROM report with police and intelligence officials in the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and the EU. The 2005 Report is based on over 4,000 websites that promote terrorist and racist movements and their operations, including fundraising, recruitment, online hate games, cyberterror and blogs.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.

VISUALS OF UK PRO-TERROR AND HATE GROUP WEBSITES MONITORED BY WIESENTHAL CENTER RESEARCHERS AVAILABLE. SITES INCLUDE AL-MUHAJAIROUN, SUPPORTERS OF SHARIAH AND TAJDEED

For more information, please contact the Center's Public Relations Department, 310-553-9036, or visit www.wiesenthal.com.