Prior to writing this, I wrote to Mr Spencer and raised my concerns about Fjordman. He told me he had long since broken with Jensen and Gates Of Vienna, but he had no interest in making any sort of public declaration. That is not even remotely good enough. Anyone reading Spencer's earlier material will find links endorsing and praising both. It really is not asking too much to expect both Spencer and Geller to show the same level of sensitivity and moral concern to the possibility of far right violence as that exhibited by the leader of the BNP.

I am not the first to notice this. During the last US presidential race, Geller and Spencer got into an argument with the blogger Ace of Spades over the Republican Governor of Texas Rick Perry, and Perry's supposed conciliatory attitude towards Islam. Ace, as he is known, is no one's idea of a bleeding heart, and the exchange is well worth reading, particularly for its conclusion, where Ace writes:

I don't think either comprehends that when they begin claiming that even the smallest gestures at bridge-building with the Muslim community — even if those gestures are doomed to produce no good results — are "dhimmi" then I don't really see any policy choices except girding for war, external and internal.

I don't know if they think about this at all.

Maybe they just think about their next blog posts.

That is admirably exact. Geller and Spencer have no right whatsoever to be this blasé about the subject, and nor can they claim to be apolitical commentators whose only concern is charting the violence of the Islamic far-Right — for the simple reason that both have made deeply political commitments, in particular in their defence of the English Defence League. (Something they have been criticised for by Melanie Phillips — again, no one's idea of a bleeding heart.)

The EDL attracts a great deal of misguided commentary, most on the question of whether or not it is racist. The evils of racism in the last century make most assume that a non-racist or anti-racist movement must be, at least to some extent, virtuous. That is not so; it is precisely the EDL's lack of racism that has allowed it to go from a BNP splinter group to one that dwarf's its parent by twenty to one in nothing flat. It is that lack of racism that makes it incredibly dangerous.

To illustrate the point, consider something else that Geller and Spencer have been slow to acknowledge: the movements called forth in response to Islamic Jihad have historically been at least as terrible in their own right. Despite Spencer's rather original reading of history, the Crusaders massacred European Jews and Byzantine Christians long before they slaughtered Muslims in the Holy Land. The Spanish Reconquista gave us the Inquisition. In response to Islamic oppression of Christians, Hulaghu Khan killed every Muslim man, woman and child in Baghdad. And it was Alijah Izbetovic's Islamic Declaration that allowed the rise of Milosevic and the horrors of Bosnia.

A similar dynamic exists today. In the subcontinent, the emergence of the Hindu fascists of the Shiv Sena and RSS, despite being formed in reaction to Islamic fundamentalism, spend a significant amount of time persecuting local Christians and, in our own country, hounding the great secular and humanist painter M.F. Husain. (Note this well: in tribal and sectarian war, it is those who want no part of it who suffer first and most). In Myanmar, the 969 Buddhist movement explicitly declares itself a sister to the EDL. And all across Europe, far-right parties have been invigorated through the foulness of the Islamic far right.