In this episode, Old-Fashioned Democrat looks at the whirling debates about Israel. Radioactive, heated, and usually irrational, the public conversation about Israel and her endless conflicts with neighbors has been half tragedy and half farce. As José points out, many of the people (on both sides of the political spectrum) who have built careers on being rational and objective lose all common sense when Israel gets mentioned. The premier example is of course Ben Shapiro, whose signature phrase, "facts don't care about your feelings," runs utterly contrary to his terrifying and unhinged rants about Israel. Among Shapiro's greatest hits are the insane notion that no matter how innocent someone is, even a toddler, if Israeli forces took their lives, it was Hamas killing them because Hamas's atrocity was tantamount to forcing Israel to kill Palestinian children. Unmoored from ethics and logic, this sadistic philosophy reflects decades of unchallenged emotionalism from Israel apologists, who typically move from pointing out the barbarity of Palestinian terrorists to engaging in cold-blooded war crimes several orders of magnitude beyond what they suffered. And at the core of the entire hurricane of propaganda lies a recurring and futile attempt to avoid talking about Israel's fundamental problem, which is its status as either an twentieth-century ethnostate based on exclusionary blood heritage or a thirteenth-century theocracy reminiscent of the era of Crusades and caliphates, as if Israel is a modern-day Constantinople or Rhodes. The trademark of good leadership is keeping a cool head even in the midst of trauma, crisis, and grief--yet this is precisely what is lacking in discussion of Israel. This is a ranging podcast worth bookmarking and reflecting on.