Title display of program by RTV:
"CrossTalk on Holocaust: Murder Revenues" and 'Holocaust Industry' Refers to Those Who Seek Profits from the Genocide Against the Jews"
Please click the play button in the screen above for CrossTalk on Holocaust - Part 1
Please click here for CrossTalk on Holocaust - Part 2
Please click here for CrossTalk on Holocaust - Part 3
A "heated debate" between Norman Finkelstein, a well known debaser of Holocaust memory and meaningfulness and Israel Charny, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem took place on RTV (Russian TV), in English, on January 27 2010, the day marked in the world by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Charny, who was filmed in a studio in Jerusalem while Finkelstein was filmed in New York, and the moderator directing the show was filmed in Moscow, tells that he was invited in calls from Moscow to appear on a show commemorating the Holocaust and agreed, and only when he asked who else would be on the show was he told it would be Finkelstein. Charny then continued in his agreement to appear knowing that he would be faced with the abusiveness of Finkelstein’s harangues against “shoa business.” He describes how at the conclusion of the filming, he was approached by a staff person in the studio in Jerusalem, a Russian Jews who has settled in Israel, who expressed heartfelt thanks for what he had said; and that he later also received a call from a staff person in Moscow in which she said that she could not have imagined that a person “could be so filled with hate” -- and asked for permission to invite Charny to reappear on RTV in the future.
Charny also reports that at least one very honored colleague, who is also a good friend, said to him that he would never agree to a debate with a denier. This is a position that has been taken by several thoughtful writers on denials of genocides, including Deborah Lipstadt in respect of deniers of the Holocaust. Ironically, Lipstadt was forced by David Irving into a huge "debate" in the great victory she had won over him and thereby over all deniers of the Holocaust. Charny has always taken the position that there is a need for some selective public confrontations and debates of deniers who are otherwise known to be causing noteworthy damage to memory and reverence. In this respect, Charny tells his favorite story of a radio debate in the US years ago between Lily Kopecky, a bonafide survivor of Auschwitz (who headed a survivor organization in Israel and published regularly a column, “Voice of the Auschwitz Survivor” in the Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide that was published by the Institute in Jerusalem over a ten year period), and Arthur Butz, who was well known for his Holocaust-denying best-seller, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz denied the gas chambers and ovens; but Kopecky herself had been an actual member of the Sonderkommando, and when she spoke as a genuine eyewitness, Butz walked out of the radio studio.
Is Finkelstein a bonafide denier? Denial intrinsically means an assertion that there was no Holocaust and it is true that Finkelstein does not do that. But we have over the years also identified denials of genocides though minimization, trivialization, and deflection of the meanings of the genocide --these concepts have developed both about the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, let alone the most virulent of all denial strategies, attacking the victims instead of the perpetrators (see the important works of Manfred Gerstenfeld on denials of the Holocaust and Richard Hovanissian on denials of the Armenian Genocide, for fine examples).
In Charny’s concept, Finkelstein very much stands convicted of being a denier!
Sources:
Russia Today - Russian TV (RTV) and GPN Staff Writeup (January 27, 2010).
