Denial of service attack
Apparently Nizkor, one of the premiere websites combatting Holocaust denial, has come under a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), which explains why the site is presently unreachable. The same thing happened to the Holocaust History Project and Nizkor three months ago, apparently timed to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It was a nasty attack that brought both sites down for nearly two weeks. So far, the Holocaust History Project has escaped.
It just goes to show that the Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites can't stand having their lies exposed to the light of day. Contrary to their posing as "free speech" martyrs, when push comes to shove, their tendency is to suppress the speech of those who oppose them, rather than to engage them in debate (mainly because, when push comes to shove, deep down they probably know their "arguments" and "evidence" can't hold up to scrutiny). Here's hoping Nizkor is up and running again soon.
It just goes to show that the Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites can't stand having their lies exposed to the light of day. Contrary to their posing as "free speech" martyrs, when push comes to shove, their tendency is to suppress the speech of those who oppose them, rather than to engage them in debate (mainly because, when push comes to shove, deep down they probably know their "arguments" and "evidence" can't hold up to scrutiny). Here's hoping Nizkor is up and running again soon.
On a perhaps pedantic note, I would have said "it is an example of...", rather than "it just goes to show". That a handful of people decide to take offline a website, does not, of course, prove anything about the (unfortunately quite large) group that they (presumably) belong to.
ReplyDeleteJust as, when a handful of, at best, misguided fools DDOSed the website of SCO (an ethically dubious company currently in the process of trying to tarnish the good name of the Linux community), it did not establish that the Linux community as a whole were not interested in free speech and open debate.
Of course, in the case of Holocaust deniers and "anti-semites" I think you are right, they don't tend to be interested in rational debate! But the fact of a few people (presumably Holocaust deniers) downing a few websites, is a poor piece of evidence to cite in support of that conclusion.