One of the weirdest episodes in punditocracy history is Chris Hitchen's long flirtation with Irving:
This is the tack Christopher Hitchens has long taken when writing about David Irving, and it is worth dwelling on him, as his writing provides a useful compendium of Irving apologias. In a June 1996 Vanity Fair column after St. Martin's Press canceled its contract with Irving to publish his biography of Joseph Goebbels, Hitchens, styling himself the macho defender of the First Amendment, called the anti-Irving articles that led to St. Martin's actions "hysterical and old-maidish." Of the historians condemning Irving he wrote, "These are supposedly experienced historians who claim to have looked mass death in the face, without flinching. And they can't take the idea of a debate with David Irving?"
The sly implication of those lines is that Irving's opponents are afraid to confront him. What Hitchens ignores is the position that Deborah Lipstadt has taken for years: that to debate Holocaust deniers implies they are expressing a fact-based vision of history. Shilling for Hitler, Irving is expressing no such thing.