San Diego, CA (special) -- The recent murders of 13 students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., by two hate-driven members of a student group called the "Trenchcoat Mafia" was a watershed event that will force schools and the rest of America to reexamine how they deal with youth violence, an official of the Anti-Defamation League predicts.

Elizabeth Coleman, the ADL's national director for civil rights, last week urged parents and schools, as a first step, to take advantage of the ADL's "hate filter" which can block home computers from accessing "hate sites" on the internet.

During a visit to the ADL regional offices in San Diego, she noted that Eric Harris, one of two student gunmen who also died in the high school shooting, had developed his own web site on which he had preached violence and had given instructions on how to make bombs. 

Coleman said that the Anti-Defamation League combs through various sites on the internet and marks those which it considers to be spewing anti-Semitism, Holocaust revisionism, racism or other forms of hate. It continually updates a program which will instruct your computer not to permit these sites to be accessed. The "hate filter" program may be downloaded at the web address: www.adl.org.

To explain its benefit, Coleman suggested that we imagine a 10-year-old Jewish child who has been assigned to write a paper about the Holocaust. The child uses a web browser to find sites related to the Holocaust, and "up comes a horrendously anti-Semitic Holocaust denial site that could scare the kid to death."

Or, she said, an African-American child might be working on the internet and come across a racist site, such as one which was called "Hang LeRoy" which encouraged children to play a word game like "Hang Man" but which ended up with "winners" hanging a Black man from a tree.

Coleman said some of the web sites are packaged in such a way as to be appealing to children who are not members of minority groups.

"The National Alliance which is a quite dangerous hate group, with a membership that is growing, has a web site which is very appealing," Coleman said. "You look at some of those racist skinhead music sites and they are very appealing. You can do an enormous amount with the graphics on the web site."

Other sites which she said were particularly vicious were those of the National Association for the
Advancement of White People, and the World Church of the Creator.

Besides recommending hate filters, the ADL official also suggested that programs like "A World of Difference," which teach students to celebrate diversity perhaps should be expanded to more and more schools.

"The glory of our country is really the differences," she said. 

Coleman was more reticent about endorsing other suggestions that have been made in the wake of the Columbine shootings such as requiring metal detectors to be installed at schools, or mandating that all students wear uniforms such as is the practice in many private and parochial schools.

On the latter suggestion, she said, "Somehow to me, I think it would be very sad indeed if we denied people their individuality to make them safe."

As for metal detectors, "I think they should really think about it," she said. "It may be that there needs to be metal detectors given the danger. We have to protect our children."

While remedial steps obviously are required, Coleman warned against rushing to a solution. 
"If you have a school where there is any hint of a problem now, the school must take action and the parents must take action, and I think the people are much more likely to take action now," she said.

"But I think certainly with the problems of hate on the internet, and other problems reflected in the tragedy at Columbine, schools, parents, public interest groups, government and whoever else need to be working in concert to figure out the most effective, realistic, constitutional solutions to the problem."