Robert Fisk: Caught in the deadly web of the internet: Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent

Robert Fisk: Caught in the deadly web of the internet: Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocentTaner Akcam is the distinguished Turkish scholar at the University of Minnesota who, with immense courage, proved the facts of the Armenian genocide – the deliberate mass murder of up to a million and a half Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish authorities in 1915 – from Turkish documents and archives. His book A Shameful Act was published to great critical acclaim in Britain and the United States.He is now, needless to say, being threatened with legal action in Turkey under the infamous Law 301 – which makes a crime of insulting “Turkishness” – but it’s probably par for the course for a man who was granted political asylum in Germany after receiving an eight-year prison sentence in his own country for articles he had written in a student journal; Amnesty International had already named him a prisoner of conscience.But Mr Akcam has now become a different kind of prisoner: an inmate of the internet hate machine, the circle of hell in which any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent without any recourse to the law, to libel lawyers or to common decency. The Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was misquoted on the internet for allegedly claiming that Turkish blood was “poisonous”; this total lie – Dink never said such a thing – prompted a young man to murder him in an Istanbul street.http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2469270.ece