Some days I wonder if I’ve lost a sense of proportion about my bugaboo, the Israel lobby. Then an item like this comes along and I tell myself: Go to the rooftops!
Greenwich, CT, used to be the heart of the patrician WASP elite. Exit 5, they called it. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody. Now it’s mixed, Allah be praised. We changed America. Lately a group called If Americans Knew, which is dedicated to the idea that If the media informed Americans about the conditions of the Palestinians Americans would change our Middle Eastern policy tomorrow, scheduled a talk at the Greenwich Library. Local sponsors did. The phone calls started. The chairman of the board of trustees then canceled the event as "offensive to public sensitivity." Which is in the library’s by-laws.
You might think that "offensive to public sensitivity" would be putting dung on a religious object or having a key-party at the Greenwich library, that kind of thing. I get that. But these people wanted to express themselves on the most important issues facing our country in the world. Offensive. Look at their website. There are only calm words here. "Israel is occupying land that does not belong to it…" Offensive to whom?
Something else. New England was the heart of the abolitionist movement that redeemed America 150 years ago on its claim that "all men are created equal." New England could do so because it wasn’t implicated intimately in the traffic in slaves. But today New England and fancy New York suburbs like Greenwich are home to the Israel lobby. And we need to re-redeem our American claim.
When Barack Obama in his victory speech Tuesday night in Wisconsin invoked the Freedom Riders of ’64 and said they were brave and some of them gave their lives for a cause they did not know if it would succeed or not, it was only necessary, he was talking about people like Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman, young men who died far from home because they actually believed in America’s potential nobility. When Obama stirs those ghosts today, they look in one direction: the American relationship with the Arab world.
Will the New York Times cover grotesque censorship in the bosom of its readership?
