The Non-Lobby Not at Work
By Kabobfest
October 11, 2006
The non-existent Israel Lobby is yet again not behind a complete coincidence where two events critical of Israel are shut down. This self-intimidation and censorship is the result of our imagination. There is no lobby.
The French embassy’s office in New York canceled a book launch because of the author’s Israel views. Author Carmen Callil wrote a book on the deportation of thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps. Normally, an author would be celebrated by Jewish and other organizations for covering this. However, Callil’s crime was in the postscript:
A party in honour of Bad Faith, Callil’s account of Louis Darquier, the Vichy official who arranged the deportation of thousands of Jews, was to have taken place at the French embassy in New York last night but was cancelled after the embassy became aware of a paragraph in the postscript of the book. In the postscript Callil says she grew anxious while researching the “helpless terror of the Jews of France” to see “what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people. Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel ‘forget’ the Palestinians. Everyone forgets.”
In the second non-incident, the Polish Consul General in New York canceled a speech by NYU Professor Tony Judt, after threats made by the crime-family Anti-Defamation League, which is a non-member in the fictional lobby boogeyman. Judt was scheduled to speak Oct. 4th to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. The subject was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy:
Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.
Wow. Anybody else sees the irony here?
The Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk aborted the talk an hour before Judt was scheduled to arrive. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had concluded that Judt was too controversial, as a Jew critical of Israel-defending Jewish institutions. Unlike Palestinians, the Consul General was treated cordially:
“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.”
The ADL did not put a horse’s head in the Consul’s bed or threaten to send him to sleep with the fishes, but these are bullying tactics wothout a doubt. Yet, like the mafia, the lobby doesn’t exist — except to its victims.
Article source: Kabobfest
