Suppressing debate on Israel

Ameinu: Who is really suppresing debate on Israel? (via Arieh)

Jeffrey Mallow on the new orthodoxy that the Israel lobby are stifling debate on Israel.

Mallow cites an International Herald Tribune column by Roger Cohen:

[Cohen writes that] Professor Fred Lazin"...attended a meeting of the American Jewish Committee... said that if he wrote a favorable review of Jimmy Carter’s recent book... he’d be ‘blackballed as a speaker in many American Jewish venues.’”

Say what? An Israeli professor critical of Israel’s policies, speaking to one of the pre-eminent American Jewish organizations, says that if he lauds the book of former President Carter, who just spoke to an SRO crowd at Brandeis, America’s pre-eminent Jewish university, he will be blackballed by American Jews? Hello Planet Earth.

But seriously folks, this is getting serious. Cohen in the same IHT article decries “post 9/11 American taboos that have lowered debate of Israel to the scurrilous (and paralyzing) if-you-back-Palestinians-you-back-terrorists level”; Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have a fat contract for their soon-to-be-published book claiming that they are being muzzled; hardly a day goes by without someone somewhere criticizing Israel, in print or blog read by millions, then moaning that he or she is being censored by “the powerful Israel lobby.” If it’s so powerful, how come it’s so ineffectual at shutting anyone up?

Read the rest.