Philadelphia Weekly

Earlier this month, the feds added websites to a list of "foreign terrorist organizations" for the first time. One of them, Kahane.net, was listed as an alias for the Jewish group Kahane Chai or Kach, which is suspected of orchestrating attacks on Palestinians. And the domain name just happens to be registered to a Philadelphia attorney.

Reuters News Service sent out a brief wire story about the State Department list on Oct. 10. Instantly, Kahane.net was flooded with hits--more than one per minute--from around the world. An electronic tracker shows the site's existence piqued the curiosity of the Brazilian government as well as the Russian press.

John Berryhill, a patent and copyright lawyer with the Center City firm Dann, Dorfman, Herrell and Skillman, owns the domain name. In fact, Berryhill acknowledges owning several controversial website addresses, including Taliban.com. So does this mean terrorists are running amok in a Market Street skyscraper?

Berryhill insists he's a peacenik whose law practice occasionally puts him in the eye of the storm. That's because he represents clients involved in domain name disputes.

It's common for people to "grab" expired domain names in hopes of redirecting the residual traffic to their own legitimate websites. One of Berryhill's clients picked up Kahane.net on April 27, 2002--sometime after the site's creators allowed their registration to expire.

Berryhill received a "desperate" call from this client on Oct. 11. The man said he'd bought the rights to numerous domain names, including Kahane.net, in hopes that they would attract Jewish visitors. He planned to draw in users and link them to websites with Jewish-related topics.

But when media reports noted that the State Department identified the domain name as a terrorist website, the client wanted Berryhill to help him unload it.

"I advised him not to drop it," Berryhill said. "If the FBI is already doing an investigation into this and you drop the name, and a real terrorist picks it up, it could look like you gave it to the terrorist." Berryhill hung up with his client and immediately notified "law enforcement authorities" that he'd taken over the Kahane.net domain.

Berryhill says he received a similarly panicked call after 9/11 from another client--the owner of Taliban.com. Rather than shut down that website, Berryhill opted to take over the domain name. "At its peak, the site got 1,000 hits a day. Then it tapered off," he says, noting that the site, which is now nothing more than a blank screen, receives minimal traffic these days. Berryhill plans to upload content in the future.

By assuming ownership of Kahane.net, Berryhill believes he can encourage a more positive brand of theology. Folks who log onto Kahane.net will find a brief history of the domain name, followed by Berryhill's reflections on the Middle East conflict.

"Finally, I would like to say that it is long past time for adults to stop behaving like children when it comes to their superstitions," he writes. "If your god is too weak and too small that it needs you to fight and to kill, then you need another god."