WHEN AQILA AL-HASHIMI was murdered on her way to work at the end of September, some people cheered. A modern Iraqi Shia woman who wore no headscarf, al-Hashimi was also a former mid-level diplomat for the Baathist regime and as such earned the fury of Iraqi extremists when she joined the post-Saddam transitional body, the Iraqi National Council. "Praise God, The Death of the Traitor Aqila al-Hashimi is Confirmed," screamed the website www.alerhap.com . The posting continued:

The media have confirmed the death of the criminal Aqila al-Hashimi, who accepted a cheap sellout of her country and nation to the American enemies. The rest of the traitors are in line for the same treatment, especially the head criminal, Ahmed Chalabi. It is well known that the Governing Council has no other aim than to legitimize the American and Zionist invasion of Iraq. That is why the American aggressors had their medical teams work hard to save the life of the criminal Aqila al-Hashimi.

The web, of course, is full of nasty sites and inflammatory postings. Such things are bound to crop up in a widely accessible medium that is uncensored. What makes alerhap--an al-Qaeda website--interesting is that it offers an example of hate-mongering tolerated in a virtual environment that is actively censored: that of Saudi Arabia.

Sure enough, the same Riyadh regime that continually promises to curb incitement by its state-supported Wahhabi clerics and media
--the same regime that successfully blocks websites airing enlightened attitudes toward women, Islam, pluralism, freedom, and democracy--leaves unimpeded inflammatory websites that recruit for violent jihad.

One Saudi writer who has complained about the government's policy on websites is Nahed Bashath. Her essay "Banning Sites or Banning Minds" was allowed to appear in the major daily al-Riyadh on August 17, in keeping with the regime's present unpredictable pattern of feints toward openness and promises of reform. Bashath reported that the authorities had just blocked access to a website on violence against women run by the Arab Regional Resource Center at www.amanjordan.org

Not only that, but Bashath cited a study carried out by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, both at Harvard Law School, which funded the project, in cooperation with the Saudi government's Internet Services Unit. Titled "Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia," the survey found that the Saudis were blocking such sources of subversion as websites run by the Anne Frank House and Amnesty International, as well as sites relating to Shia Islam, Christianity, the Baha'i faith, and tolerance and interfaith dialogue generally. The Harvard study is available online, at least to Westerners, at Harvard law

Its executive summary is worth quoting at length:

Abstract: The authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. The authors conclude (1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom; (2) that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.

The Saudis' explanation for blocking sites is predictable: "preserv[ing] our Islamic values, filtering Internet content to prevent materials that contradict our beliefs or may influence our culture." According to the Harvard researchers, the Saudis further explained that they block sites "related to drugs, bombs, alcohol, gambling, and pages insulting the Islamic religion or the Saudi laws and regulations."