It was a great night in the Paddo RSL. It was an open-to-all public meeting to hear and question candidates in the Wentworth electorate — Christian Democrat, Palmer United, Green, Labor, and the Liberal incumbent and former leader Malcolm Turnbull. There were hecklers, interjections, boos, cheers and laughter. It was infectious. I found myself booing the Greenie. It was like the good old days and far more engaging than those constipated TV debates — although the latest has shown a better way. If the parties cannot agree to allow some spontaneity into Leaders’ TV debates, they may as well give them up.

The Australian tour of the Holocaust historian, Deborah Lipstadt, has been barely reported. She was the American defendant in the famous libel action in London in 2000, which David Irving brought against her after she described him as a dangerous Holocaust denier. She won the case, wrote a book about it, and now gives her latest reflections on what she sees as ‘a new anti-Semitism’ and ‘a new anti-Israelism’. She offers one key to the Middle East.

This is her argument. Back in the early 20th century the standard anti-Semitic stereotype was that Jews were greedy, pushy, cunning manipulators of the rest of us. It was false, insulting, hurtful but not sinister. That changed with the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust. The anti-Semites fell silent. But they did not disappear. Anti-Semitism was soon transmuted into a pseudo-sophisticated revisionism. The new anti-Semites reject the testimony of survivors, perpetrators or observers of the Holocaust. They reject documentary evidence. If they are sometimes called Holocaust deniers, this is not altogether accurate. They concede the Holocaust happened but insist it has been massively exaggerated. There was no attempt, they say, to wipe out the Jews of Europe. The figure of six million murdered is a vast over-estimate. There were no gas chambers. Some hostility to Jews was legitimate.  Above all, Hitler had nothing to do with it. It was done, as it were, behind his back. The whole thing was invented to extract reparations and to justify Jewish seizure of Arab lands to create Israel.

So the old stereotype — of grasping, manipulative Jews — re-emerged as anti-Israelism. Several writers, including the occasional scholar, have advanced all or some ideas of this kind. They include the Englishman David Irving. He remains unrepentant. He has served time in prison (in Austria) for his public speeches. He still has supporters and sympathisers (even including a few Jews). There used to be, before the London trial, a sort of Fair Play for Irving committee but its membership, always small, has fallen dramatically. Christopher Hitchens, for example, used to admire The Destruction of Dresden (a source for Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five). He invited Irving home for a drink and a chat (‘We have all sorts at our place’), although he and his wife decided never again. (Too ‘creepy’.) But after the evidence given at the London trial Hitchens agreed with the British scholar Richard J. Evans that not one sentence in Irving’s work can ever be taken on trust as accurate.

My own extremely limited experience dealing with Irving’s work can be no more than suggestive but it supported Hitchens and Evans. In the late 1980s, before the London trial, I was researching the Hungarian revolution of 1956 for my book The Liberal Conspiracy on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Among the works I read was Irving’s Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare: Hungary 1956. It turned out to be of no use to me. Irving’s theme was that the Hungarian insurgents were stout Magyar patriots battling Jewish communists. My theme was the historic role of the Hungarian writers, artists and intellectuals, many of them Jews, in their struggle for cultural freedom from Soviet oppression. I had met one of them — Tibor Méray — during his visit to Australia to help expose the Melbourne ‘Peace Conference’ of 1959 as a communist front. He was a spokesman for truth and an uncompromising critic of the Communist party. I have kept in friendly touch with him in the years since and helped in a minor way with his definitive On Burchett (Callistemon, Melbourne, 2008.) For Irving, he had ‘the air of a bank clerk about to be caught with his hand in the till’. He also had ‘an undersized head, and shifty, apprehensive eyes’. He is, of course, Jewish and an ‘odious opportunist’. Like Hitchens, I saw why scholars agree that not one sentence in Irving’s works should be accepted on trust.

But should he continue to be banned from visiting Australia? He says he wrote to Julia Gillard last January seeking her support so that he might conduct seminars in Australia, consult archives, and visit his Australian daughter and grandchildren. But successive governments have refused him a visa on ‘national interest’ grounds. When, in a public confrontation in London in 1997, John Howard responded to his challenge in a lawyer-like non-defamatory way, Irving thanked him for his ‘courteous and shoddy answer’.

The ban would indeed be indefensible if Irving were simply a maverick scholar. But he is far more. He is a virulent agitator and in a real, not quixotic, sense a disturber of the peace. There has been no attempt to ban his books, blogs or videos. That will have to be enough. But it is not an easy decision to reach if, like Deborah Lipstadt, you declare: ‘I am a free speech person.’