So, this week the mask has definitively slipped. A few days ago — see last entry but one — the Guardian put out an editorial slamming the Palestinian Authority leadership as surrender monkeys over leaked documents showing they broadly accepted that the so called settlements in east Jerusalem could reasonably become part of Israel under a peace agreement.

Today, the paper has taken the next logical step. It has given a high profile platform (via an op-ed) to a representative of Hamas — an organisation whose revered founding charter incorporates the ideas and language of the Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of Zion, whose senior members have described the Holocaust as a hoax, whose television stations and ideological supporters routinely refer to Jews as the “sons of apes and pigs”, whose thugs murder homosexuals and beat women, and whose terrorists (not infrequently brainwashed child suicide bombers) have slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the most barbaric manner imaginable.

There is not a single neo-Nazi group anywhere in Europe or the United States that comes within a million miles of this level of bestiality. And yet there he is, Osama Hamdan, a leading international representative of that very same group, his photograph beaming out at us, slap bang in the middle of the comment pages of Britain’s foremost opinion-forming news outlet.

The Nazi-Soviet pact, anyone?