I think most people, apart maybe from Bush, would see what Putin's army has done in Chechnya as state terrorism of the worst kind. And there are grave suspicions, based on some convincing evidence, that the terrorist attacks in Moscow that helped launch the second Chechen war, and propelled Putin to power, may have been set up by the theirs of the KGB.

If there is more attention paid to Israel than to Russia in the media and in other places, that largely reflects the fact that Israel is widely seen as a counter where there is more hope of people taking some notice of criticism.

As Barbara says it is "a democracy". Indeed, there is an manufactured air to this democracy, since it was founded on an ethnically cleansed population, analogous in some ways to the majority created in Northern Ireland by means of partition, or the apartheid dream of a white nation with its black population living in Bantustans - but it is still a democracy, and votes count.

It is probably truer today to say that anger at Israel is a major factor in generating anti-Jewish anti-semitism rather than the other way round. That doesn't make it any prettier or less inexcusable when it surfaces, but it fuelled by different sources than the kind of anti-semitismn that played such a crucial part in bringing Israel into existence.