James Lileks describes his thoughts on Mark Steyn's stunning new essay to Hugh Hewitt:

I don't like to think that these things...but in the back of my mind, I know that I've already written Europe off. And it's a very strange feeling. It's almost as if I've just regarded them as a lost cause, and I'd like to see it before it goes, and I'd like my daughter to go there before Notre Dame is deconsecrated. But it's just a very peculiar feeling, saying well, all right, we've lost Europe.

Up until now, it was unnecessary in the West, outside of Germany and Austria, to pay serious attention to those who disputed the historicity of the Holocaust: they constituted a tiny fringe group, and dismissing their views had little political risks or consequences. They could simply be shrugged off as quacks, at best, and crypto-Nazis, at worst. But this recent wave of Holocaust denial is not coming from a statistically insignificant potion of the West; it is coming from Muslim leaders with popular followings, and what is even more troublesome, it is not being challenged by others in the Muslim community. As the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, "The problem is that so far in the Arab world, very few leaders are willing to tell their own people that they have to understand that the Holocaust did take place” -- a statement that is putting it very mildly, indeed.

Are we dealing here with simply two different but equally legitimate points of view of what happened to the Jews under Nazi Germany; or are we dealing with a new ideological virus, and one that is on the verge of spreading like an epidemic?

We in the West have already rewritten a great deal of history in the name of cultural tolerance and diversity. But are we prepared to deny the truth of the Holocaust in the name of the same principles?

Yet, if you think about it, why not? After all, if different cultures can have different values, why not let them write different histories? Who’s to say whose history is right anyway? Are not Muslims entitled to their own interpretation of the historical past, like everyone else? What gives the West the right to impose its own ethnocentric interpretation of history on the rest of mankind? If the West insists on forcing Muslim to accept that the Holocaust really occurred, isn’t this a form of “historical” imperialism?

You see here the slippery slope upon which the West has so frequently lost its footing of late. Let us hope that, in this one instance at least, it is prepared to dig its heels in and stand firm.

Update: Neo-Neocon sees a glimmer of hope in, of all places, The Guardian.