Hezbollah has spent most of the past year lobbing rudimentary and largely ineffectual rockets in the general direction of northern Israel, whence most of the civilian population has in any case already long departed.

I am not in the business of offering advice to Benjamin Netanyahu on how to prolong what some might consider to be an already excessively elongated political career. Far from it. But if I were, I would urge the Israeli prime minister to watch “The Godfather.”

For defenders of the right to free speech — and anyone who read these pages last week will know that I am one — the encrypted messaging app Telegram presents something of a conundrum.

So you pop into your local coffee shop, you order your usual caramel oat milk latte, you meet a friend and you chat, and you pass on a piece of scurrilous gossip about a mutual acquaintance that, while entertaining, is entirely devoid of any basis in fact.

Well, that got interesting very quickly, didn’t it?

Americans’ instinctive reaction to anything they do not immediately understand is to shoot it, or sue it.

It is said that in the event of an international security crisis, the Americans go to DEFCON 1, the Brits convene a meeting of the COBRA emergency committee and the French raise their national alert level from “surrender” to “collaborate.”