(walking up onto his soapbox…)

My eyes glaze over when I see all of this coverage about Israel and Palestinians. Yes, I understand it is important socially or religiously to some of you, but the world has so many problems, and most of them are on a far bigger scale.

For example, since 1998 the various inter-national and intra-national conflicts in the Congo has claimed a total of about 5 million victims, either killed, injured, or forced to move.

5 million. In little over 14 years.

And tell me, how many front page headlines has that garnered?

Well?

Damn few.

Or how about this: right now, in Bangladesh, a sweeping fire in a major slum has killed at least 11, and injured or displace an unknown figure. Just one in a sea of tragedies there. On rare occasion Bangladesh does get a headline, but mostly we’d just rather forget the millions living in squalor there, as long as we can get our really cheap clothes at the local $1 discount store.

So I take all this coverage of a small state in the middle east with its most likely intractable inter-religious squabbles as a fixation due to our own religious heritage and, frankly, an escape from tackling the bigger problems of the bigger world.