RACIST SPAM SENT WORLDWIDE BY GERMAN NEO-NAZI PARTY

If you've been getting e -mails with subject lines like "Bloody Self-Justice," "Multi-Kulturel=Multi-Kriminell," or Turkey in the EU -- with a short message saying "read for yourself" and links you're supposed to follow -- then you're the victim of a Sober.Q worm sent to infect your computer by the NPD (German National Party), a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic party that has scored heavily in some parts of the country by preaching racist, anti-immigrant xenophobia. So reports Der Spiegal Online this morning. This brown-shirted worm is attacking computers all over the planet.

Last year, the NPD shook Germany when it got a frightening 9.2% in elections in Saxony, winning representation in the parliament there for the first time ever. This January, the dozen NPD legislators in Saxony caused an international scandal when they disrupted a moment of silence in the parliament to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Allied forces during World War II -- the NPDers walked out, and made statements belittling the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. (The NPD's leaders frequently make anti-Semitic remarks).

The racist spam that has flooded inboxes from Australia to Anaheim with hundreds of thousands of e-mails is designed to boost the NPD's score in elections this coming Sunday in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populated state. The Sober.Q virus, Der Spiegel says, is "the newest version of the Sober virus, a worm that infects address books and sends a copy of itself to all the entries. Various security firms have released warnings that they received hundreds of thousands of Sober.Q emails within the first 24 hours of the virus' outbreak."

Furthermore, "Sober steals mail-addresses from infected computers and distributes itself in the name of any mail-address it can find. Another thing. Sober.Q runs on computers previously infected by an earlier version of the virus, Sober.P, which appeared only a week ago disguised as an email proclaiming free tickets to the Soccer Cup in 2006. That virus, which was able to switch into German or English, was particularly effective in soccer-crazed Germany, which will be hosting the cup matches," Der Spiegel says. (The Register in the U.K. also has a piece on this worm, and Pendagon has a ton of e-mails from readers complaining they've gotten from a dozen to hundreds of these spammed racist e-mails. )

The government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tried to have the NPD banned as racist two years ago. But the case blew up when it was revealed that many of the NPD's leaders named in the case against it were agents of Schroeder's security services, and that these government moles had initiated some of the provocative, violence-inducing actions that were included in the list of charges the government cited in calling for the party to be outlawed.

The NPD's vote in Saxony last year was, in part, a reaction to the government's attempt to ban it. I've always opposed attempts to ban hate speech or parties that engage in it -- such actions always contributed to the martyrdom complex such extremists always cultivate, bring them attention they would not have received otherwise, and make them attractive to disgruntled, politically illiterate, unemployed youth of the kind who made up Hitler's brownshirted private army, the S.A., whose strong-arm tactics helped bring him to power.

Anti-immigrant campaigns have allowed far right and neo-fascist parties all over Europe to grow by surfing on the Continent-wide new wave of racism, an atmosphere of hate and fear that is also fueled by starkly declining birth rates among the native white populations and intensive breeding by the largely Arab and Turkish immigrants. But let's hope Germans aren't fooled by the NPD next Sunday.

And if you've received one of these Sober.Q e-mails, and clicked on one of the links in them, get your computer disinfected fast -- it means the NPD has turned it into a machine to reproduce and spew their hate.

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