Last August Chomsky was asked the following in the Z Magazine conferences:
"Professor Finkelstein's book on *The Holocaust Industry* (Verso: 2000) has received little coverage in the US, though far more debate has taken place in Britain. Why would this be so? Could it be apathy? Or is it because the whole Holocaust industry is too big a corporate entity to challenge, even if it would mean that the victims of Nazi aggression got the financial donations given to Jewish American bodies who do not pass on the money to those who suffered. In the UK the book has generated some heat..."
Chomsky's response was as follows:
Whatever the reasons, they are surely not apathy. Attention to the Holocaust in the US has been extraordinary since 1967 (as Norman Finkelstein reiterates), far more so than in England. Nor is it because the Holocaust industry is too big a corporate entity. It isn't much of corporate entity at all. Notice incidentally that some of the most important conclusions in Norman's book were scarcely mentioned in England, and here not at all I suppose: namely, that the prestigious commission that investigated the bank situation for the Claims Commission concluded that the record of the US banks was among the worst -- but no one is going after the US banks, for reasons not hard to discern.
You are quite right that the reaction in England and the US was quite different. In England, Norman's book was serialized in the major dailies, there were any number of prominent articles, he was interviewed on BBC, there were public debates, etc. Here there would probably have been no comment at all had it not been for the extraordinary coverage in England, known to many people here. The backup procedure in such situations is for the NY Times -- the "gatekeeper" -- to publish a hatchet job, essentially informing librarians not to purchase the book, and informing other journals that take their cue from the agenda-setting press to ignore it. There'll presumably be more, but the difference was, as you say, dramatic.
To understand it one should bear in mind a few other things, which are of some general interest, apart from this case. First, the reaction in much of Europe was about the same as in England. Second, the sharp distinction is not restricted to this case. Books on the Middle East that do not adhere to the standard version here are also treated quite differently in the US and in Europe. To take merely one example, consider Norman's first appearance in the public arena, about 15 years ago, when he did a careful study (as a graduate student) of a book by Joan Peters, called _From Time Immemorial_, which alleged, with an impressive array of footnotes, that there was no moral issue in denial of Palestinian rights, because the so-called "Palestinians" were mostly recent immigrants who came to Palestine when the Jews began to develop the country. I won't run through the details of what happened, but they were quite illuminating. The Peters book received hundreds of enthusiastic reviews, and virtually no criticism. Norman's work demonstrated that it was utter fraud. He was unable to publish anything in the mainstream, and subjected to considerable pressure to drop the matter. That's where it would have ended had the publisher not made the tactical error of allowing the book to be published in England, where it was ridiculed and dismissed with contempt (as it had already been in Israel), relying in no small part on Norman's research, though leading scholars and other specialists weighed in on their own. US intellectuals read the British journals, and the comparison was extremely embarrassing, enough so that the NY Review of Books (which had kept out of the chorus of acclaim, probably recognizing that the bubble was going to burst sooner or later) commissioned a review -- from an Israeli scholar, the usual technique, so that there can be no accusations. The review was mildly critical (less so than the author knew was justified), but enough to make it clear that the game was over. After that the whole incredible affair was dropped like a hot potato, and is now out of history -- which makes sense, because it tells one quite a lot about the US elite intellectual community.
None of this answers your questions, but should help provide groundwork for an answer. The questions are far more general, not bearing specifically on this book. --Noam Chomsky