Toward the end of last year, a star reporter at the prestigious German magazine Der Spiegel was revealed to be a serial fabricator. Over a dozen of his articles turned out to have two things in common: numerous, often obvious, and easily disprovable fictions and an unflattering depiction of the U.S. To Bruce Bawer, the popularity of these articles, and the credulousness of readers and editors, are further evidence of the prevalence in Germany of a species of anti-Americanism—also borne out by polling data—that cannot be entirely separated from attitudes toward Jews:

While Hizballah has for four decades successfully terrorized civilian populations on at least three continents, European states have proved painfully slow to designate it a terrorist group, let alone impose sanctions and other law-enforcement measures. Both the EU itself and France only applied the designation in 2013, but still hold fast to a fictitious distinction between the group’s terrorist “military wing” and its supposedly legitimate “political wing.” Nonetheless, the continent has begun to acknowledge the dangers of Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, and last year six Central European states banned Hizballah completely. Much credit, writes Alex Benjamin, is due to Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the former deputy prime minister of Bulgaria: