Jewish organizations block NYU historian Tony Judt from speaking at the Polish consulate in New York. WaPo reports:

Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.

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."

More from Juan Cole:

Eisenhower threatened Ben Gurion with calling in American loans to the Israeli government in 1956. Ike could have and would have. The Israel lobby would turn on the Republican Party in an instant if Bush tried that with Olmert, as senior Bush found out, and would be very effective in working Congress to undermine the president. Therefore, Bush doesn't do it. And since the Israeli Right only makes peace under US pressure, peace doesn't get made. And the vicious circle goes on, building rage and hate that will probably get more US cities blown up eventually.

The Israel lobby has tried to set it up so that not only within the Jewish community but also in wider American society, questioning a rightwing form of Zionist nationalist propaganda is a taboo...

If a binational state is offensive to Judt's critics, then they had better get used to being offended. By 2030, Israel's own census bureau projects that about 30 percent of Israeli citizens will be Arabs if current birthrates hold... The only way to avert this outcome... is either genocide against the Israeli Arabs or ethnic cleansing of them.