Outrage spread rapidly via Twitter earlier this week based on the spurious claim that President Trump intended to label Jews “a separate nationality”—a move denounced as encouraging anti-Semitism or as itself anti-Semitic. Although correct information about the executive order that sparked the controversy is now widely available, one need not look far to find essays and editorials condemning it in heated terms. Liel Leibovitz notes that just as “our bien pensants were whipping everyone into a wild frenzy” over this imagined act of anti-Semitism, an armed couple attacked a kosher grocery store in a ḥasidic enclave in Jersey City, killing two Jews, one Gentile, and a police officer. The couple had brought with them multiple pipe bombs, and could easily have achieved far bloodier results. Leibovitz writes:

According to the Lebanese government, the explosion in its capital city on Tuesday that left over 100 dead and many more injured or homeless was caused by the accidental detonation of some 2,750 of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer often used for making bombs. (Less than one-thousandth of that amount was used by Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.) Previously, police have discovered Hizballah warehouses in London and Germany storing many tons of the same explosive. Hussein Ibish comments: