Criticisms
Holocaust denial Web sites and spokespersons have made repeated accusations against McVay, challenging his neutrality and attacking him personally. The Nizkor web site has been accused by self-proclaimed "Holocaust revisionists" and neo-Nazi Web sites as being funded by Israel and other Zionist sources, though McVay consistently denies these charges. He states that the Nizkor Project is funded solely by donations from the general public, as well as his own personal finances.
In the late 1990s, the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized the Nizkor Project for increasing the visibility of hate groups and Holocaust deniers, even as it sought to debunk them. This debate between free speech advocates such as McVay and those who favor the suppression of speech with hate crime laws continued throughout the late 1990s, but has now mostly been resolved with the two sides agreeing on the common goal of confronting bigots and keeping their disagreements over specific tactics private. In 1996, McVay spoke out against Internet hate crime laws in Canada in front of a committee of the Canadian Parliament, stating that it is better to address the false claims of Holocaust deniers, rather than to censor them.
Read more about this topic: Nizkor Project
Famous quotes containing the word criticisms:
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)