An attorney for the Illinois Bell Telephone Co. has claimed that an anti-Semitic, anti-Negro message that can be dialed on local phones is perfectly legal and that the phone company was not obligated to remove it.
The attorney, John Heinrich, was approached on the subject by Bob Gale, a staff member of The Sentinel, an English-Jewish weekly published here. The paper had received numerous calls protesting the message which advocates the use of force and violence to solve the “Jewish and Negro problems.” The message purports to come from the American National Socialist White Peoples Party, of Arlington, Va., a successor to the defunct American Nazi Party of the late George Lincoln Rockwell.
According to Mr. Heinrich, the telephone company is not legally responsible for the contents of the message because the name and address of its sponsor is given. He suggested that any action taken would have to be against the sponsors. He also stated that “the telephone company does not want to set itself up as a censor,” Mr. Gale reported.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
