On 20th February The Australian published a substantial news report under the headline: ‘Australia “top pick for hate preachers”’. We learned that two Jews, Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, and Josh Burns, the preselected Labor candidate for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, had appealed to Immigration Minister David Coleman to ban British writer David Icke from entry into Australia. Icke is a voluminous writer in the ‘alternative history’ field, some of whose work I looked at many years ago and decided was significantly unreliable. He struck me as comparable to that other extraordinary but deluded man, L. Ron Hubbard. I carry no flag for Icke’s work. His proposed tour was titled ‘Everything you need to know’, which suggests self-inflation.
However, The Australian began its report by labelling him a ‘Holocaust denier.’ It stated that he has campaigned to have ‘Holocaust denial’ taught in schools, that he claims that the Rothschild family are among the leaders of an ‘Illuminati’ that runs the world, that he believes that ‘a small Jewish clique’ helped cause various disasters including both the world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the global financial crisis in 2008 and the September 11 attacks. He may not be entirely wrong in all of that; and these are topics which may require open discussion if we are to make some sense of contemporary politics, national and international. The fact that an unreliable egoist holds forth on them does not justify excluding them or him from our public forums. The scare campaign started by Burns and Abramovich looks to contain gross exaggeration; and a Jewish demand to curtail criticism of Jews appears to be special pleading.