Italy's embarrassment for a Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been described as a great friend of the Jews and Israel. So, how does one explain this very off-colour joke by the ageing lothario, as reported in the Vatican's Osservatore Romano.

Berlusconi told a youth rally an apparent "joke" about Adolf Hitler: ”A Jew hides a fellow Jew in his basement at the time of the concentration camps, and he charges him € 3,000 a day [US$ 4,000]. The Jew paid up because he had the money but do you think he should tell him that Hitler has died and the war is over?”

Jews as money-grubbers? Now where have I heard that before?

And that's not all, the World Jewish Congress reported that a minister from Berlusconi's Freedom People Party also had a dig at Jooz.

The day after Berlusconi cracked his Jewish joke, a senator in the governing Freedom People party, was also accused of anti-Semitism. In a speech to the Senate, Giuseppe Ciarrapico, 76, called Gianfranco Fini, the politician who has split ranks with Berlusconi, a traitor. "Has Fini's grouping already ordered the kippah?” Ciarrapico asked, referring to the Jewish skullcap. "He who has betrayed once always betrays," he added, apparently referring to Fini's decision to break with his neo-fascist political past and visit Israel to denounce Nazism in 2003.

Emanuele Fiano, an MP with the opposition Democratic Party, called Ciarrapico's statement "shameful". He said: "It is a few decades since we heard something like this in parliament. He spoke of the skull cap as if it were dishonorable."

Where's the moral outrage of those who are so easily morally outraged at anything some fringe left-wing group says or does? What no action memo from the ZF?