During the First World War, the Ottoman government systematically killed 1.5 million Armenians. If you ever want to anger a large number of Turkish people, refer to that event as “genocide.”

On Sunday, New Pope did exactly that.

“In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive and unprecedented tragedies,” the Pope said at a mass to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian massacres. “The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the 20th century,’ struck your own Armenian people.”

It was a sentiment that didn’t sit well with a Turkish “hacker” known on twitter as @THTHerakles. On Monday, he brought down New Pope’s website. Writing in first person plural, he explained that it will remain down until New Pope appologizes.

“Taking sides and calling what happened with the Armenians genocide is not true. We want Pope to apologise for his words or we will make sure the website remains offline,” he said.

I suppose there are two sides to every issue — even genocide. The pope’s against it. Which side are you on, @THTHerakles?

As of this writing, the Pope’s website remains unreachable.

UPDATE: As of 10:38 EDT, New Pope is back online. It looks like he scaled vertically. There are now four A records for www.vatican.va. On each he has an apache server which is forwarding requests back to Oracle iPlanet. It’s just like New Pope to straddle the worlds of open source and corporate opulence.