Quick quiz: Whom are we fighting in Afghanistan? If you say “the Taliban,” you’re only giving the easy answer. What exactly is “the Taliban?” Who comprises it? What are its motives, its goals?

Most people would say that the Taliban is a hardened group of “terrorists,” an extremist group of murderers bent on destroying freedom and eliminating the West. This view is understandable — it’s all anyone hears from the politicos and pundits, who, in their laughably narrow debate over the war (has anyone in power seriously advocated immediate withdrawal?), paint “the enemy” in broad strokes and leave little doubt that we’re engaged in a conflict of ideas.

Ariela Rutkin-Becker wants to know what I want to know, and the bomb-loving crowd won’t tell: “What I want to know,” she wrote on Tuesday, “what burns me up at night is how are so many other American Jews not red-in-the-face, infuriated, embarrassed and righteously indignant now with Israel’s response to Gaza’s rocket-fire?” Ms. Rutkin-Becker, unwillingly and unknowingly conscripted by her temple sisterhood into the Stay-Here-in-America-but-Send-Money brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, isn’t the only one with a presumptive synagogue.