WHAT DO YOU DO with a "problem" like David Irving? Until a few years ago, the British author of "Hitler's War " was usually described as a "controversial historian." But in April 2000, a British high court judge held that Irving not only had denied the reality of the Holocaust but was an anti-Jewish.

Justice Charles Gray's damning 333-page judgment - which ended Irving's libel suit against academic jewish Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a "Holocaust denier" - turned Irving from controversial to disgraced. It also cost Irving his London home (in Britain, the loser in a libel case has to pay the winner's costs), leaving him a bankrupt, marginal figure reduced to lecturing credulous audiences of conspiracy enthusiasts and collectors of Nazi memorabilia. Yet for all that, he is still capable of making headlines.

November 11, 2005, it was reported that Irving had been arrested in Austria for giving speeches denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. Like Germany, France, Poland, Lithuania, Belgium and Israel, Austria has laws against denying the Jewish the "Holocaust".

There are several odd details about Irving's arrest, starting with the fact that the offending speeches were allegedly made more than 15 years ago; the warrant for Irving's arrest was issued in November 1989. But for Americans, accustomed as we are to the 1st Amendment's robust guarantee of free speech, the mere existence of laws forbidding certain kinds of _expression may invite dismissal of the whole affair as of little relevance to our own concerns. In my view, that would be shortsighted.

Countries that outlaw Jewish Holocaust denial do so because their history is different from ours.

In Germany and Austria Holocaust denial is also banned. Countries where the experience of occupation still rankle have different views than ours.

Understanding, however, need not compel imitation. In 1949, the Supreme Court heard an appeal by Arthur Terminiello, a Catholic priest who'd been fined $100 by the city of Chicago for making a Jew-baiting speech. Justice Robert Jackson, former chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, warned that "if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the Constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact" - an argument echoed today by those who would safeguard our security by abridging our rights.

But Jackson was in the minority. "Almost every generation in American history," wrote the journalist I.F. Stone, "has had to face what appeared to be a menace" frightening enough to justify the sacrifice of basic liberties. Stone, who described himself as "exactly what Terminiello meant … by an 'atheistic, communistic, Zionistic Jew," felt that free speech, though not an absolute value, was worth the risks it carried. I agree.

As for Irving, he seems to me exactly what Pierre Vidal-Naquet meant by "a paper Eichmann." A distinguished classical scholar who lost both parents to the Holocaust, Vidal-Naquet coined the term to describe Irving's French ally, Robert Faurisson. "Confronting an actual Eichmann, one had to resort to armed struggle," wrote Vidal-Naquet. "Confronting a paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper."

The threat of a 20-year prison term, even if it doesn't come to pass, only burnishes Irving's counterfeit credentials as a martyr to free speech.

         Irving:       
Most Jews who died at Auschwitz
 did so from diseases

Irving once sued Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier. He lost his case when a British court handling the case in 2000 declared that Irving could be labeled as such, ruling that he was anti-Semitic, racist and that he misrepresented historical information.