One can hardly imagine the Anti-Defamation League’s Director Abe Foxman storming a stage to prevent NYU Remarque Institute Director and historian Tony Judt from speaking on the Israeli lobby’s inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy. On that same day leftists did exactly that to prevent (in the name of fighting fascism, of course) Minuteman Jim Gilchrist from speaking on immigration at Columbia University.

That’s what the ineffectual do when confronted with ideas whose flow they wish to arrest. Instead, however, they were arrested.

Such antics are beneath Foxman. He need only pick up the phone—more than once, if necessary—to “look into” the matter. The Polish Ambassador is not a child. He does not have to be asked to cancel Judt. “The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,” Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk said. “That's obvious—we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.” Foxman can therefore say with a straight face, “We had nothing to do with the cancellation. . . . We didn’t ask for it.”

The Consulate’s Marek Skulimowski took a different approach. The Consulate, he explained, “is a diplomatic post. Whatever is organized here should be in compliance with Poland's foreign policy.” The President of Poland recently paid a visit to Israel, you see, and a talk critical of Israel in a rented room within the Polish Consulate in New York City, even if given by a Jewish individual who lost family members to the Nazis, would apparently be noncompliant.

Network 20/20, the discussion group that invited Judt, meets regularly at the Consulate. But not before October 4 did they know that compliance with a foreign country’s foreign policy was a condition of their leasing space.

That Professor Judt will speak and write about on his chosen topic elsewhere, at least for now, does not diminish the significance of this episode that seemed designed to illustrate the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. This impeding of the circulation of certain views was “the right thing,” according to American Jewish Committee’s David Harris.

Of course, had Consul General Kasprzyk told Foxman to mind his business, the “resurgence of official Polish anti-Semitism” would still be headline news. But that didn’t happen, and Foxman is free to smear any imputation of pressure to him as “the conspiratorial nonsense that Mearsheimer and Walt are spinning with the support of Tony Judt.”

Read Foxman’s own press releases on this matter here and here. For reportage of varying usefulness that the ADL would like to flush down the memory hole, this site seems to provide one-stop shopping.

Last week The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer debated the topic of the Israel Lobby’s influence with lobbyists Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross at Cooper Union (site of the 1860 Lincoln-Douglas debate) in New York. The London Review of Books sponsored the event, and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Center’s Anne Marie Slaughter chaired it. I’m on the lookout for such news, but learned of it late when I was forwarded this article, which concludes:

The packed audience in the hall was often partisan, cheering for particular sides in this debate, but it seemed largely supportive of Prof. Mearsheimer and was kept in balance by the able hand of Dr. Slaughter. It was a travesty of news coverage that it was not televised, not even by C-Span, and no major media covered the event, including the major newspapers.

Were these nobodies debating an arcane topic in some hole-in-the-wall? No, the topic was timely, and the participants, sponsor, chairperson, and venue of the highest quality.

Would only a conspiracy nut conclude that our major media’s gatekeepers simply decided to black out the “undebatable” — even when it is in fact debated?