When Ephraim arrived at his hotel in New York, the sidewalk had been cordoned off, limos were parked at the curb, and ominous, dark-suited men in dark sun glasses abounded. Ephraim knew that a conference of the leaders of Jewish organizations was being held in New York that week. When he asked himself who would warrant such security, he answered, “Netanyahu!”

When Ephraim asked the desk clerk if he was correct, he was told, “I’m sorry, sir, but we keep the identities of our guests confidential.” Some hours later, when Ephraim asked the concierge the same question, he received the same answer. “But their body language,” Ephraim told me, “confirmed my reasoning.”

That wasn’t all. Neither the evening television news or the morning papers reported Netanyahu’s presence in New York. They maintained the fiction that he was in Israel, where, as it happened, an invasion of Gaza was about to launch. “It shows,” Ephraim went on, “the media can not be trusted to tell us what is happening in the world.”

I don’t know how many times Ephraim told his story. I don’t know to how many people he passed along his lesson. But the next time I heard him tell it, he added that his cab driver’d said, “I think it’s Peres.”

When I got home, I Googled “New York City Shimon Peres.”

It was Peres. But I only have the word of the New York Times and Wahington Post for it, and we know who they’re in bed with.

Plus, the guy telling you all this still thinks Oswald shot Kennedy.