According to a report recently released by Germany’s Ministry of the Interior, 92 percent of the anti-Semitic incidents in the country since January were the work of right-wing extremists. German authorities came to this conclusion because, by government fiat, any anti-Semitic crime is categorized as a “politically motivated right-wing extremist crime.” Evelyn Gordon explains why this approach is not only misleading but dangerous:

There are two good reasons for thinking the linguistic acrobatics, in this case, represent the rule rather than the exception. First, a 2014 study of 14,000 pieces of hate mail sent over a ten-year period to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin found that only 3 percent came from far-right extremists. Over 60 percent came from the educated mainstream—professors, PhDs, lawyers, priests, [and] university and high-school students. And these letters were definitely anti-Semitic rather than merely anti-Israel; they included comments such as “It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition?” . . .

[U]nless you want to make the dubious claim that Germany’s educated mainstream—unlike that of other Western countries—consists largely of far-right extremists, it’s clear that far-right extremists aren’t the only people actively committing anti-Semitic acts.

Second, in other Western European countries, Islamic extremists are a major source of anti-Semitic crime. Thus it’s hard to believe that Germany—which, as several terror attacks over the last two years have shown, is hardly devoid of such extremists—would be the one exception to this rule. . . .

Far-right anti-Semitism is, of course, real. But so are left-wing and Islamic anti-Semitism. And by pretending the latter two don’t exist, the German government has made it impossible to combat those types of anti-Semitism effectively, since you can’t fight something whose very existence you refuse to acknowledge.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.