Canard

It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards.

There is a notion gaining credence that the free market breaks down national barriers, and that corporate globalization's ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live together happily inside a John Lennon song (Imagine there's no country...). This is a canard.

[W]hen a Hamas spokesman recently stood by his statement that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children for their matzos – one of the oldest anti-Semitic canards around – European elites were largely silent.

It is a canard trotted out by lazy or tendentious journalists that nationalised British Railways lacked entrepreneurial flair.