With the Palestinian legislature now in the hands of a faction, in Hamas, that is airing videos on its Web site claiming, “We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews,” and with the president of Iran jailing pro-freedom journalists, denying the Holocaust, and vowing to wipe Israel off the map, our friends in the American press have lately been preoccupied with defending the free speech rights of Holocaust denier David Irving. Mr. Irving was sentenced, by the government of Austria acting under a law that bans Holocaust denial, to three years in prison.

The New York Post, a friend of the Jewish cause, found room for both a column by Eric Fettman under the head line “Wrong Answer – Jailing a Holocaust Denier” and a column by George Will, himself a philo-Semite, describing Mr. Irving’s imprisonment as “indefensible” and a “folly.” The Daily News, owned by a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman, ran out a column by Richard Cohen condemning Austria’s decision as “fascist.” We can understand the reasoning; our own Hillel Halkin wrote a column a couple of weeks ago arguing that laws against Holocaust denial are counterproductive. The Wall Street Journal, which has been heroic in its defense of Israel, ran both a column by Christopher Hitchens calling Mr.Irving’s imprisonment a “disgrace” and an editorial claiming, “By imprisoning Mr.Irving, Austria has now forced serious people to come to the principled defense of a detestable man.”

Well, call us the immovable object. We don’t question the motives of our friends at the other newspapers, but we have a different judgment. Austria, by our lights, is a country apart from most of the rest of the world when it comes to the war against the Jews. Mr. Will notes that Austria was Hitler’s birthplace, but that doesn’t really do the story justice. What was once a vibrant Austrian Jewish community that included Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl was obliterated just 65 years ago. The way the Encyclopedia Judaica characterizes it is that “a large part in the campaigns to exterminate European Jewry was played by Austrian Nazis,” who included not only Hitler but also Adolf Eichmann, who was raised in Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria. On Kristallnacht in Vienna alone, the Judaica reports, “42 synagogues were burned and 4,038 Jewish shops were looted.” More than 100,000 Jews fled Austria before World War II; of the 60,000 that remained, most were killed by the Nazis, some of them in Austria’s own concentration camp, Mauthausen.

If Austria’s modern democracy wants to try to contain those impulses by making a free-speech exception in respect of Holocaust denial, its voters have plenty of reason. Its anti-Semitism neither started with Hitler nor ended with him. Austria’s post-War reckoning with its past has been far less forthright than Germany’s. Kurt Waldheim was elected president of Austria in 1986. One day some years ago, we traveled to Austria from Germany with a man who once served as America’s envoy in Vienna, a beautiful city with wonderful food and music and architecture. As our friend showed his friends around, he started by remarking that Austria was different from Germany. In Austria, he observed, the anti-Semitism was still so thick that one could feel it in the air.

One of the ways we tend to divide the current debate is between those who reckon the war against the Jews that engulfed Europe in the 1940s has ended and those who comprehend that it hasn’t. Feature what’s happening in France, where at this moment the government is hunting down a gang that tortured a man to death because he was Jewish. One of the effects of Austria’s jailing of Mr. Irving is that it prevents him from traveling to meet with a president of Iran who is plotting a nuclear attack on the Jews of Israel, who today number just a million shy of the 6 million killed in the Holocaust. The Austrian government’s action deserves to be recognized not as folly or disgrace but as an act of wartime prudence and a kind of atonement by a country starting to recognize that its great error of the 20th century was not only the authoritarianism but the anti-Semitism itself.

If Austria wants to make a free-speech exception, its voters have plenty of reason.