"In his address, the 90-year-old Mr Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq could provide the jolt needed to modernise the Middle East. Instead, he spoke about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Mr Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their “cosmic struggle for world domination”. This is a familiar framework from the original author of the phrase “the clash of civilisations”. What did surprise me was Mr Lewis’s denunciation of Pope John Paul II’s 2000 apology for the crusades as political correctness run amok, which drew clapping. Mr Lewis’s view is that the Muslims started the trouble by invading Europe in the eighth century; the crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and reconquest. Were one to start counting ironies here, where would one stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticising the Pope for apologising to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews."