A local college campus is going to play host to the Israel 360 program and an invitation or notification or whatever tey call it ended up in my Facebook inbox. So I clicked “maybe attending” along with a friend and, following her lead, added some photos to the event’s photo album.

Most of the photos people had added were predictable images of the Israeli flag against a multi-hued sky, some beach pictures, happy looking care-free Israelis, etc, etc. The event listing declared, “Come see Israel like you have never seen it before!”, so my friend and I added some photos of Israel soldiers suppressing nonviolent demonstrations, the Wall, occupied houses in East Jerusalem. I posted a link to the website for Mearsheimer and Walt’s book on the Israel lobby. Within a couple of hours they had been removed. I thought, maybe that’s a glitch so I added them again. Again they were removed.

What follows here is the email correspondence between the event organizer and myself after they emailed me.

Organizer: Dave,
Although your opinions are completely fair and valid, Israel 360 focuses only on Israeli culture and the country itself, not the conflict.

Your thoughts deserve to be heard but this is not the forum to do it on.

I hope you can be respectful of that.

Me: Thanks for the message.

I’m not sure how you can divorce the occupation from Israeli culture. They are part of the same whole. Isn’t a fair discussion of the reality in Israel – good and bad – the discussion Jewish Americans should be having?

Unbelievable.

…in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.

Cecille Surasky lays it out:

Dissenting at your own risk
By Cecilie Surasky
Special to the Star-Telegram

Last year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel’s occupation. My talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself “America’s pro-Israel Lobby.”

A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program’s funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.

Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.

Why is Israel’s increasingly brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic support that makes it possible?

“Newton believed in prophecy. He thought God controls all of reality, time, and history,” he said. “He believed in prophecies in the Old Testament that talked about the Jews’ return to Israel… thinking the return would happen past the 17-18 th centuries.

Many Christians thought Jews would all convert to Christianity and that Jerusalem would rebuilt spiritually. Newton has more respect for the Jews, and thought they would return physically,” Snobelen added.

Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity, earliest known Likudnik.

Read more