There's a lot going on in the world right now, but if you're on social media, and of course

you are, because it's really America's only remaining news source, you know there's only one

story going on, and it's Israel. Everyone online is arguing about Israel, and really they fall into

one of two camps, generally speaking. So probably the more aggressive side are the deranged Taliban-level ethno-narcissists

who are telling you that any criticism of the secular government of Israel is tantamount to

blood libel against the Jewish people. And if you think that maybe it was not a great idea

to arm Joseph Stalin, the greatest murder in history, then you're a Holocaust denier.

Shut up!

And then on the other side, a group every bit as obsessed with Jews are the people who hate Jews

who are telling you that anyone who's Jewish is bad by virtue of being Jewish.

It's a blood thing.

Two things are interesting.

One, there are very few kind of conventional Christian voices saying,

wait a second, this is a secular government, another country, and it has probably nothing to do with

my religion or anybody's religion. And we should never judge people on the basis of their immutable

qualities because guilt and virtue are not passed down

genetically. But almost no one is saying that. So you really have the ethnococists and the

anti-Semites and they're at war with each other. That's the online picture. What's even more

interesting and maybe even more distressing is that in the U.S.

government, the conversation, while much more muted, is a mirror of this in that a lot of the

conversation is about Israel. Israel, a tiny country in the Middle East, not critical to our

national security, by the way, but the conversation, the bandwidth is consumed by questions

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