RUTHFULLY YOURS

AP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

The mayor of Paris is threatening to sue Fox News for segments she claims have insulted her city.

The mayor of Paris told CNN on Tuesday that she will sue Fox News.

Why?

Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour that she must sue to preserve the honor of her fair city.

“The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced,” Hidalgo said. “I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed.”

Hidalgo was responding to some segments on Fox News in which various commentators stated that there are parts of Paris and other European cities where Muslims predominate and where there is so much uncontrolled violence that police are afraid to venture. These areas have been referred to as “no-go zones” for non-Muslims.

“For some this may be a sad, perhaps even a tragic conclusion. These are feelings I can understand. But I also remind myself that what France loses, Israel will gain.”
As the sound of “Death to the Jews!” filled the streets this summer, much of the French elite averted its gaze or blamed the Jews for their own misfortune. Do Jews still have a future in France? On July 13, the eve of Bastille Day (a national holiday in France), a mob laid siege to the Don Abravanel synagogue in the Eleventh district of Paris. The “protesters,” mainly of North African Arab origin, had broken off from a larger demonstration supported by a small band of left-wing allies—Communists, militant anti-Zionist Trotskyists, a few environmentalists, and trade unionists—waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to the Jews” (Mort aux Juifs) along with the Islamist battle cry, Allahu Akbar!

What drove the great writer to employ a “harem” of translators? A new film tells much, but not all.

Writers have their way with the world until they depart from it, and then they are at the mercy of those who interpret them. This mischievous turnabout would have appealed to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), possibly the most prolific and certainly the most famous Yiddish writer of the 20th century, whose reputation is now in the hands of types he once turned into fiction. But if The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a new documentary movie by the Israeli directors Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser, is any portent, the afterlife of this particular writer may be graced by the same improbable good fortune he enjoyed on earth.

Would the world rather dodge news of Alberto Nisman’s death?

The AMIA bombing is a marker for the West’s failure in the war on Islamist terror over an entire generation. Its resistance to tackling Islamic terror mirrors its myopia over communism.

The death of Alberto Nisman the night before he was supposed to testify before Argentina’s congress on the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires is an incredible development in one of the seminal stories of the past generation. How is the world going to dodge news that the Argentine federal prosecutor in the AMIA bombing case should fetch up dead just before he was due to testify on his accusation that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s link to the bombing that took 85 lives?