http://www.cjnews.com/front3.htm October 21, 1999
Anti-Holocaust
denial Web site's future
uncertain By FRANCES KRAFT, Staff
Reporter TORONTO
- An extensive
educational Web site that has played a
significant role in debunking Holocaust
denial faces a tenuous future, unless
further funding is secured. Ken McVay, founder and director
of the Nizkor Project (www.nizkor.org),
said last week he has sufficient funding
to last only until January. "Even though
there has been some very strong support
from a few very generous people, it
hasn't been enough," McVay, 59, said in
a phone interview from his home on
Vancouver Island, B.C. He is in the process of determining the
site's commercial value, although he said
it is not currently for sale and he does
not foresee shutting it down. McVay has listed the site on
www.GreatDomains.com with an "asking
price" of $500,000, based on the size of
Nizkor and the amount of traffic it
attracts. The site receives about 9,000 hits a
day, said McVay. It has grown from 27 pages in 1995 to
almost 5,000 pages, including the entire
transcript of the trial of Adolf
Eichmann, he added. McVay is proud to have those
transcripts, the product of 18 months of
negotiation. "I know that the Holocaust
deniers, who absolutely revile this site
and me, refuse to talk about the Eichmann
trial. They can't lie about it now." The job is never-ending, said McVay.
Among his current projects, he is working
on making documentation from the Nuremburg
trials available. Although McVay says the years of
devoting himself to Nizkor have left him
weary, his tone of voice - and the fact he
recently spent four consecutive 20-hour
days on the project - belie his claim. "Of
course I care," he asserted. "I never stop
caring. I don't know what I'd do without
[Nizkor]. It's my life." McVay believes
that only a "small and very dedicated
group of people" does care. He guesses
that of the estimated 100 to 300
million Internet users in the world,
only about 100 are actively involved in
fighting racism on the Net. Nizkor began when McVay, a non-Jew with
a long-standing interest in World War II,
encountered Holocaust denial on the
Internet in the early 1990s. He was
angered by the bigotry he perceived. "I'm still angry," he said. "It makes
me angry that there are very few people in
the world who give a damn about this." A native of Santa Clara, Calif., McVay
grew up in a middle-class neighborhood
where, to the best of his knowledge,
racism didn't exist. In high school, about
half his friends were not white. "We never
thought about it," he said. "Maybe I was
just naive." Although McVay had read extensively
about World War II, he knew little about
the Holocaust per se. "I had just enough
background to know that [Holocaust
denial] was crap, but I didn't have a
clue why it was crap." McVay made it
his business - his obsession, actually
- to learn the truth, and show it to
the rest of the world. "That's the beauty of the Internet," he
said. "Most people exposed to the venom of
Holocaust deniers do not have the time or
resources to check the so-called facts
they provide." The Net, he noted, has given him access
to prosecutors, historians and community
leaders who have provided Nizkor with
testimony and answers. Over the years, McVay has developed a
worldwide network of dozens of volunteers
to help him access, translate and post
material. The League for Human Rights of
B'nai
Brith Canada administers the
Nizkor Fund, through which donations
to support the Web site can be
channeled. Editor's Note: The
Nizkor Project is listed in CJN Internet's
Related Sites page, under
Holocaust-Related. |