{news} Fw: USGP-INT: Tony Judt and the Israel Lobby at Work

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Walton" <richard at soup.org>
To: <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 5:16 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Certainly Not the First Time and Certainly Not the Last: 
Israel Lobby at Work


> Hi:  I fear no one will be surprised that the Israel lobby has again
> succeeded in silencing a critic.  These items appeared in The Progressive
> Review today. Peace.  Richard.
>
> PROMINENT SCHOLAR BANNED FROM SPEAKING THANKS TO PRO-ISRAEL EXTREMIST
> GROUPS
>
> TONY JUDT - I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group
> called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGO, academics,
> etc, from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US
> Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in
> Manhattan. I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The
> talk was canceled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the
> Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman
> warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted,
> he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with
> anti-Israeli anti-Semites (= me) all over the front page of every daily
> paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were
> forced to cancel."
>
> WASHINGTON POST - An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul
> General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation
> League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly
> concluded Judt was too controversial. "The phone calls were very elegant
> but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said.
> "That's obvious -- we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand
> that."
>
> Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family in
> the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his speech. He
> noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at
> Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had
> complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such
> problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three
> decades. The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.
>
> "This is serious and frightening, and only in America -- not in Israel --
> is this a problem," he said. "These are Jewish organizations that believe
> they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away
> from anyone who might listen."
>
> The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate to
> block Judt's speech and accused the professor of retailing "wild
> conspiracy theories" about their roles. But they applauded the consulate
> for rescinding Judt's invitation.
>
> "I think they made the right decision," said Abraham H. Foxman, national
> director of the Anti-Defamation League. "He's taken the position that
> Israel shouldn't exist. That puts him on our radar."
>
> David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, took
> a similar view. "I never asked for a particular action; I was calling as a
> friend of Poland," Harris said. "The message of that evening was going to
> be entirely contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign policy."
>
> Judt has crossed rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations on two
> key issues. Over the past few years he has written essays in the New York
> Review of Books, the London Review of Books and in the Israeli newspaper
> Haaretz arguing that power in Israel has shifted to religious
> fundamentalists and territorial zealots, that woven into Zionism is a view
> of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and that Israel might not survive
> as a communal Jewish state.
>
> The solution, he argues, lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a
> binational and secular state.
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/08/AR2006
> 100801053.html
>
> JUDT ON ISRAEL, THE COUNTRY THAT WON'T GROW UP
> http://prorev.com/2006/10/israel-country-that-wont-grow-up.htm
>
>
> "The only way out of our crisis (terrorism) is to reduce the anger of the
> most rational, thus also reducing the constituency of the least rational."
> Sam Smith.
>
> "When they come for the innocent without crossing over
> your body, cursed be your religion and your life."  Anon.  But often
> quoted by Dorothy Day.
> -- 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> "Richard Walton" <richard at soup.org>
> -----------------------------------------------------------