Oh dear. It seems bumbling ‘Uncle Joe’ has done it again. Fresh from his Holocaust gaffe, President Biden has now decided to offend not one, but two allies, when he gave his thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict. On a visit to a hospital in East Jerusalem today, President Biden made remarks that were picked up by the travelling American press. He compared Israel’s contemporary treatment towards Palestine to that of Britain’s historic attitude towards Catholics in Ireland, saying that:

…the background of my family is Irish American. And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years for 400 years.

Predictably, such comments haven’t gone well in either country at which the jibe was aimed. It’s simply the latest ill-thought remark as part of Biden’s global gaffe tour. On Tuesday, he got embroiled in teleprompter trouble after he mistakenly read out the instructions: ‘End of quote. Repeat the line’ and on Wednesday he said he wants to keep ‘alive the honor of the Holocaust.’ Such errors aren’t confined to the Middle East of course: in March Biden suggested in Poland that he’d use the 82nd Airborne against Russia, called for ‘regime change’ in Moscow and implied he’d use chemical weapons against Putin. Whoops!

His lacklustre deputy is little better: Kamala Harris has claimed on multiple occasions that the US is supporting Ukraine ‘in defence of the Nato alliance’ – even though, er, Ukraine is not in Nato. She also offered this bizarre explanation of America’s support for Kyiv:

So Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.

Talk about leaders of the free world, eh?