Malkin moves, takes child from school, as SC students retaliate

In the easy and anonymous world of cyberspace communication, angry partisans on both sides of the anti-war movement can volley threatening barbs at the click of a button. UC Santa Cruz students and conservative pundits alike have seen such messages filing up their in-boxes in the wake of last week's campus protest.

After nationally syndicated columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin posted the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of three members of Students Against War, they received a flood of obscene and harassing messages from around the country, including death threats. When a liberal Web site, in retaliation, published Malkin's cell phone number and home address, a full-blown blog war ensued.

"I am now forced to remove one of my children from school and move my family," Malkin wrote Thursday in an e-mail to the Sentinel.

Malkin, author and Fox News Channel contributor, runs one of the most popular right-wing sites on the Web, attracting 145,000 hits daily, according to Web log rankings on truthlaidbear.com.

On April 11, Students Against War flushed military recruiters out of a campus job fair.

The next day, Malkin copied the cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses of three student activists at the demonstration from a news release intended for journalists and pasted them in her online column titled "Seditious Santa Cruz vs. America."

"I woke up in the morning and my cell had 14 new messages, 25 missed calls and it kept going on," said SAW member David Zlutnick, estimating the group's three media contacts have already sifted through 500 e-mails, more than 100 with death threats.


When students called Malkin to request she remove the student information, Malkin reposted the names and numbers several more times. She defended the decision, blaming SAW for posting a link to the news release on its Web site.

To Zlutnick, the retaliation Malkin got was simply "a taste of her own medicine."

"But to put all our energy into a cyber war with this crazy right-wing lady takes away from our larger mission to end the war," he said.

Contact Roger Sideman at rsideman [at] santacruzsentinel.com.

The cyber war

A sample of e-mails sent to Students Against War media contacts after their addresses were posted on a Web site:

* 'My sincere hope is that a couple hundred of the local patriots take a day off work for your next anarchist event, and come down with some axe handles and bust your (expletive) heads.'
* 'Don't let the right-wing hate mail get you down. They're just a bunch of cowards behind a computer. You guys put your bodies on the line for justice.'
* 'Once you grow up, I hope you realize at some point in your lives that war is inevitable. Conflict will always be with us, regardless of whether or not we close our eyes and pretend it isn't so. It all boils down to: Do we want to win or lose?'