Age does not invariably bring wisdom with it, as is proved by the latest words of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. From his usual position in the upside down world of Back-to-Front Land, Bishop Sabbah blames the victims of terrorism and their supporters, but not the terrorists.

"But if the U.S. wants Israel to survive, to be recognized, then it should take measures to surround Israel with friends. But current U.S. policy is surrounding Israel with enemies. That's not the way to protect your friend." Israeli forces moved into the Gaza Strip Nov. 1 in an effort to halt rocket assaults on southern Israel. Five days of Israeli air raids and gunfire left nearly 50 people dead. Patriarch Sabbah said the United States and Israel were provoking conflict and that the Palestinians were reacting to Israeli oppression.

Perhaps his memory is becoming faulty in his old age. He forgets that the Arabs have been making genocidal attacks on the Jews long before ‘current US policy’. They were trying to wipe out the Jewish State while the West Bank was still part of Jordan and Gaza was part of Egypt – long before the ‘occupation’. They were carrying out massacres of Jews for decades before the State of Israel even existed. Poor old fellow must have forgotten.

Melanie Phillips reminds us of the real reason for Palestinian violence: Nazi-style hatred.

She writes about the film “Obsession”

More than that, this film shows in graphic and undeniable detail that this jihad is a direct descendant of Nazism. It has clear historical links – it was to the Nazi-supporting Mufti of Jerusalem in 1941 that Hitler vouchsafed that he intended first and foremost a war of extermination against world Jewry; it has the same agenda of genocide of the Jews and world domination, and the same techniques (and almost identical motifs and visual imagery) of whipping up a frenzy of murderous rage against America and the Jews through repeated hysterical claims of their purported and infernal intention to destroy the Islamic world, conveyed through truly diabolical imagery straight out of the handbooks of medieval and Nazi blood-lust.

She demolishes Bishop Michel Sabbah’s claim.

The widespread belief in the west that jihadism, suicide bombers and the rest of it are merely responses to recent actions by Israel or America, or to ‘oppression’ by Israeli occupiers, is demonstrably ridiculous.

Is Bishop Sabbah’s statement merely ignorant or malicious? It is certainly “demonstrably ridiculous”.