This is the crucial cultural difference between America and Europe. Despite fantastic hysteria from the chattering classes, the danger of "radical Christianity" can be easily dismissed in America. The worst that the American Christian Right can produce are tiresome bigmouths who demand cash to oppose gay marriage and are promptly found curled up with rent boys. One can rightly point to this spectacle and say: you expect me to be frightened by this?

The European Christian Right is another beast. The extreme European Christian Right does not have names like "the Moral Majority" or "Focus on the Family", but names like the Ustasa, the Falange, and the Legion of the Archangel Michael. The word for these movements, used correctly for once, is Fascism.

Mention this word, and someone always quotes Orwell: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable'." What very few people seem to remember that the essay in question, "Politics and the English Language", concludes as follows: "Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this." In contrast to what is assumed, Orwell was warning, not that there was no such thing as fascism, but that sloppy language gave a dangerous cover to fascism.

This is the problem with disordered stuff about "Judeo-Christian civilization". Under such a broad term, very unpleasant things can creep in. In the introduction to Spencer's book Religion of Peace: Why Christianity is and Islam isn't, he approvingly cites the essayist Fjordman (Peder Jensen) that Western civilization requires both its Christian and its Jewish legs to stand. The first problem with this is that it seems to forget the Hellenic and Latin legs. The second problem is that Jensen, alias Fjordman, is a principal inspiration for Anders Behring Breivik.

Once again, a great deal of rubbish needs to be cleared away here. It is unfair and unjust to brand anyone Brevik chose to cite in his manifesto as an inspiration for his act of mass murder, and it is both grotesque and pathetic that Breivik is used as an excuse to silence discussion of Islam and the Islamic far-Right — in fact, it is those who have spent the last ten years making excuses for the violence of Islamic fascism who bear the bulk of responsibility. However, Jensen is not simply a critic or opponent of Islam. In his writings he says, quite explicitly, that given the failure of Europe's democratic leadership to tackle Islam, it is necessary to violently overthrow it and institute a rule that will take the necessary steps. In so many words, that is the Breivikist position.