Bias declared, I find it grotesque that Ms Geller's appropriates for her blog the title of Ayn Rand's famous book, and I am far from the only Objectivist who thinks so. To the best of my knowledge, Geller is no Objectivist and is not affiliated with any official Objectivist institution. I should also add that the two greatest moments I have been privileged to witness in my lifetime have been the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Nelson Mandela. It is absolutely insufferable to see anyone make mockery of that great moment for the lowest kind of cheap political capital.

Robert Spencer is another matter. One cannot accuse Spencer of intellectual unseriousness — at least not on the subject of Islam and Islamic doctrine. You simply cannot seriously argue about the question of the conflict between Islam and modernity if you have not carefully read his work. However, whenever his writing touches on other matters, it reverts to standard American Conservative boilerplate.

American conservatism may be loosely described as an uneasy marriage between classical liberalism and evangelical Christianity. This leads to a number of oddities — the defence of capitalism as the product of "Judeo-Christian civilization" and so forth. The real problem arises when this stuff crosses the Atlantic, for in continental Europe, Christian civilization means something very different.

Take the closing passages from Spencer's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades:

It is time to say "enough," and teach our children to take pride in their own heritage. To know that they have a culture and a history of which they can and should be grateful; that they are not the children and grand-children of oppressors and villains; and that their homes and families are worth defending against those who want to take them away, and are willing to kill to do so.

The problem lies not in these stirring words, with which I agree, but with the final sentence that follows them:

Call it a Crusade.

The problem with this is that the last crusade was not the counterstroke of Christian Europe against Islamic aggression, but rather La Ultima Cruzada — the assault, by General Franco, at the head of an army of Muslim mercenaries, enjoying the support of Hitler and Mussolini and the blessing of the Vatican to destroy the Spanish republic.