At the same moment that Donald Trump was condemning the suicide bomber in Manchester as "an evil loser in life", he was adding to the chaos in which al-Qaeda and Isis have taken root and flourished.

It may be a long distance between the massacre in Manchester and the wars in the Middle East, but the connection is there.

He blamed "terrorism" almost exclusively on Iran and, by implication, on the Shia minority in the region, while al-Qaeda notoriously developed in the Sunni heartlands and its beliefs and practises primarily stem from Wahhabism, the sectarian and regressive variant of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia.

It flies in the face of all known facts to link the wave of terrorist atrocities since 9/11 on the Shia, who have most usually been its target.