RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sweden is a country where using the word “mass immigration” usually gets criticized just for sounding racist. Only anti-Semitism does not get criticized. In Sweden, all other forms of racism — even things that some say could be classified as racism — are criticized, and ruthlessly.

TV4, one of the most important Swedish media outlets, in 2015 described anti-Semitism as simply a “different opinion.”

“What is history for us is not the history of others. … When we have other students who have studied other history books, there is no point in discussing facts against facts.” — The administration of an adult-education school, in a reprimand to a teacher who said the Holocaust actually took place.

“The Jews are campaigning against me.” — Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström.

There are fewer than 20,000 Jews in Sweden; more than 20,000 Syrians received asylum in 2014 alone. That is why so few politicians — who are eager to win the votes of immigrants — talk about Arab anti-Semitism.

President Obama imagined he could end his second term with an arms-control detente with Iran the way Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union. It looks instead that his nuclear deal has inspired Iran toward new military aggression and greater anti-American hostility.

The U.S. and United Nations both say Iran is already violating U.N. resolutions that bar Iran from testing ballistic missiles. Iran has conducted two ballistic-missile tests since the nuclear deal was signed in July, most recently in November. The missiles seem capable of delivering nuclear weapons with relatively small design changes.

The White House initially downplayed the missile tests, but this week it did an odd flip-flop on whether to impose new sanctions in response. On Wednesday it informed Congress that it would target a handful of Iranian companies and individuals responsible for the ballistic-missile program. Then it later said it would delay announcing the sanctions, which are barely a diplomatic rebuke in any case, much less a serious response to an arms-control violation.

JERUSALEM—A gunman opened fire outside a popular bar in the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, killing two people and wounding at least three others before he fled the scene, police said.

The motive for the shooting spree, which took place on a busy street, wasn’t immediately clear, police said. Media reported the assailant was a member of Israel’s Arab minority and called it a nationalistically motivated attack, but police refused to comment, saying the investigation was under way.

Israeli Channel 10 TV showed CCTV footage of the incident, obtained from a health-food shop next to the bar. The video showed a man with short hair, glasses and a black bag over his shoulder scooping up some nuts, putting them in a plastic bag, then emptying them back. The footage then showed the man walking toward the entrance of the store, placing his backpack on a shopping cart and taking a gun out of it. He then stepped outside and started shooting, after which he ran away.

The final planning for the terrorist attack in Paris last month might have taken place in the Molenbeek district of Brussels—but, like the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., weeks later, the inspiration came from a continent away, in the self-proclaimed caliphate of Islamic State, or ISIS. The difference: ISIS directly engineered the Paris slaughter, while the San Bernardino killers appear to have simply taken cues from the terror group.

Even so, ISIS propagandists have been promising for months to bring the full panoply of their horror to Europe and the U.S. They began the Twitter hashtag #WeWillBurnAmerica. An article this spring in the official ISIS magazine, Dabiq, promised an attack that would make “any past operation,” including 9/11, look like a mere “squirrel shoot.”

Many in the West view Islamic State’s barbaric crimes—its genocidal campaign against the region’s Christians and Yazidis; its lovingly choreographed beheadings of innocent journalists and aid workers—with horrified bafflement. They see ISIS as an aberration that appeared last year as if out of nowhere. They have a vague idea that it is related to, or grew out of, al Qaeda.