It was very moving for this Israeli to visit the US while the American people were mourning the death of their former president Ronald Reagan. The outpouring of respect and affection was overwhelming. Again and again, pundits and commentators reiterated his remarkable achievements: reviving a laggard American economy by undertaking bold, often controversial and risky reforms that catapulted America into a spectacular two decades of growth and prosperity; reinvigorating the American spirit by projecting a vision of America as a power with a global moral mission and building the force to back it up; above all, winning the Cold War largely by the strength of his conviction that liberty must triumph over evil, and by his determination not to accept a status quo that so many came to treat as inevitable.

The BBC is at the forefront of the anti-Israel media pack in Europe. It has been so effective in smearing Israel as a rogue state that in a recent poll, Europeans rated Israel as more dangerous to world peace than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Iran or North Korea.