So many dead in the last few weeks, so many hurt, so many homeless, so many in danger of disease in the wake of the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China. In Myanmar alone, at least 34,273 are dead and 27,838 missing — and the death toll could mount as high as 100,000, according to the United Nations.

Both Newsweek’s Anna Quindlen and The New York Times drew special attention this week to an issue that’s been scarcely raised in this flag-pin-centric run-up to the election but is arguably of greater urgency than the very urgent need to end the war in Iraq: the future makeup of the Supreme Court.

As Quindlen notes, "[T]he work of the high court has had vast systemic influence over the lives of all Americans, an effect that lasts through generations."

Passover is a time of telling — in fact, the very word "haggadah" means "the telling." Telling is all we have today of that perilous journey from the narrow space of Mitzrayim to freedom. We have no eye-witness or survivor accounts; we have no photographs of enslaved Jews; we have no films of fleeing caravans; we have no proof of the parting of the Sea of Reeds or of the fates of pursuing soldiers within it.

It is no surprise, therefore, that some historians are skeptical of our sojourn in Egypt and our escape from it; you might call them "Exodus deniers."

Think what Passover meant for centuries: the blood libel, the repellent and groundless charge that Jews stole Christian children, crucifying and killing them, and making matzoh with their blood. But it was, of course, the Jews who suffered, paying dearly, with their livelihood and often with their lives, for this absurd belief.

A cartoon on the Website www.politickernj.com is headed "Rothman the Mohel, or, Ferriero’s Bris." By Rob Tornoe, it shows a yarmulked, maniacally smiling Rep. Steve Rothman (D-9) about to wield a meat cleaver on Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero’s (artfully blocked out) private parts. Meanwhile, an equally yarmulked Sen. Frank Lautenberg is shown holding Ferriero down for the procedure.

That’s understandable, given the murderous fury unleashed by the Danish cartoons portraying Mohammad. In fact, in a kind of hommage to those cartoons, in "Fitna," a cartoon Mohammad wears a bomb in his turban, which ultimately goes off.

Created by extremist Dutch legislator Geert Wilders, "Fitna" — named for an Arabic word whose meanings include "disturbance," "chaos," and "strife"— is a collage of violent Islamic texts, speeches, deeds, and gestures. Passages from the Koran, calling for death to "unbelievers" by gruesome means, are shown and read aloud throughout, interposed with such pitiable, horrifying scenes as the burning, falling towers of the World Trade Center (and the voiced terrors of the people within them); bombs exploding; scarified bodies; the brandishing of swords and knives and exhortations — to applause — to "cut the throats" of Crusaders (i.e., Christians) and Jews. (In fact, one cleric, identified as speaking in Saudi Arabia, says, "Throats are there to be cut.") One tiny girl, clearly coached, tells her unseen Dutch interviewer that Jews are "monkeys and swines." She knows that because Allah said so, in the Koran.

What to make of all this?

The film is shocking, and we are perversely glad to have had the chance to see what these people feel. (Note that by "these people" we mean only the people onscreen; there is no way to know what "the silent majority" of Muslims feel.) And as advocates of free speech we can only defend its dissemination against those who would suppress it.

But the film is clearly provocative, as were the Dutch cartoons. Wilders hates Islam as much as the "Fitna" clerics hate "unbelievers," unapologetically, unrelievedly, and without making distinctions. He is thumbing his nose (or making another, obscene, gesture) at millions of credulous and poorly educated Muslims who must feel shame and rage at what he has wrought. We hope that their rage does not erupt in violence, thereby proving Wilders’ bitter point. RKB

Multiply them by four, the 1,002 mainly young Americans killed in Iraq — just since Jan. 1, 2007 — whose photographs filled four pages in Tuesday’s New York Times. Then multiply that number by grieving fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sweethearts, sons and daughters.

Psychologist Michael J. Salamon begins his wise and rueful book about how Orthodox Jewish singles meet (or don’t meet) with the transcript of a telephone call that cries out to be reprinted:

Caller: Dr. Salamon, I am calling because I have to find out some important information regarding a shidduch.

Dr. S.: Of course, you know that I am not at liberty to discuss any private information. Not only is it illegal; it is unethical.

Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — no color was available for the pages we had allotted for our coverage of last Thursday’s massacre at Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem. The blood in the photographs you will find on the opposite page and on pages 24 and 25 was so pitifully plentiful, so pitifully red.

Last week we inveighed against fraudulent e-mail blitzes about a university that knuckled under to Muslim pressure to stop teaching the Holocaust. (The pressure was not applied and the Holocaust remains in the curriculum.) This week another scam has come to our attention: a falsehood (as documented on Snopes, the Internet Urban Legends Reference Page at http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/refugees.asp) that immigrants to this country are draining our social security and Medicaid funds to the detriment of natural-born Americans.