But instead, victim and victimiser in the Middle East have been stood on their heads. Israel -- whose settlement policy is wrong and morally corrupting, but that is not the fundamental issue here -- has instead been demonised and dehumanised, and blamed for trying to prevent its citizens from being murdered, a defence which is represented as aggression; while the Palestinians' deliberate targeting of the innocents is said to be legitimate or understandable self-defence. It is this denial of truth, logic and history, this grotesque moral inversion, which is driving the violence in the Middle East --which, like all such terrorism, seeks to achieve precisely this kind of reversal in public opinion, in which the Europeans and Americans between them are so hideously complicit.