Early on Friday, I linked to Lee Harris's article on Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Holocaust denial. Harris wrote:

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.

When I linked to Harris' article, I wrote, "Thanks to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, European and American multiculturalists are about to face their gravest test". I think I started to write "American multiculturalists in academia" but opted to keep it short.

Looks like I shouldn't have. Charles Johnson writes:

Dr. Abdullah Muhammad Sindi, a US-based Saudi professor of political science who has taught at UC Irvine and Cal State Pomona agrees wholeheartedly with the Holocaust denial of Iranian president Ahmadinejad.

And he’s teaching American students.

Be sure to read Sindi's own words on the subject.This is a Kerry-like Global Test for American academia as to whether or not someone who views the Holocaust is a myth should be allowed to continue to teach.

Think they're up to the challenge? Sadly, me neither, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Update: Dr. Helen writes:

Have you noticed that as time goes on and people start to forget the horror of tragedy that the mind tends to rewrite the past? Perhaps this is human--for example, a family member dies and we rewrite their life to fit into our own scheme of how we feel about our own lives. If Dad was a fairly pleasant guy, we might overstate how cruel he was to keep ourselves from grieving. But on the other hand, if Dad was downright cruel and abusive, we might rewrite history in our minds to make him out to be a good guy. Either way of thinking puts our mind at ease and gives us the opportunity to feel virtuous about ourselves. In the case of these Muslim leaders with dementia times two, we have a case where they use the denial of the Holocaust as a tool for provoking sympathy from the West and anger in their followers in the Mideast. What better way to further their cause. But can we really allow them to use the bodies of six million corpses to make a political point?

Who in Europe--or academia in general in the case of Sindi--will stop them?