I wrote my first diary on exceptionalism warping the perceptions of Americans, including the members of our community, in 2014. I can even quote from it regarding the two common misconceptions that contribute to the problem:
1. Everything that happens in the world happens because some force in the US made it happen. 2. Reading a popular article (or several) in the US or (at best) English press makes you an expert on a mad rat's nest of regional conflicts that predates the US by several centuries.
Sadly, the same exceptionalism permeates a lot of the most heated recent discussions in our community centered around the Hamas terror raid of October 7 and the ongoing Israel retaliation in Gaza. If anything, reading some comments I begin to doubt whether some people commenting actually appreciate that the folks dying or dead in the Middle East are as real as them. More below the cut.