"I've Already Written Europe Off"

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.

Thanks to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, European and American multiculturalists are about to face their gravest test, Lee Harris writes:

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