"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."

- Frances Kraft, Canadian Jewish News, 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.