Mission Statement

I had never before heard Tony Judt's name before Juan Cole mentioned him this morning in Informed Comment - such is the sorry state of my political horizons.

Googling him, I discover the following from the 9 October edition of Washington Post:

• Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe.
• 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.
• Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his speech. He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three decades.
• Judt has crossed rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations on two key issues. Over the past few years he has written essays in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz arguing that power in Israel has shifted to religious fundamentalists and territorial zealots, that woven into Zionism is a view of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and that Israel might not survive as a communal Jewish state. The solution, he argues, lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a binational and secular state.
• He has, of late, defended an academic paper, The Israeli Lobby co-authored by professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, which argues the American Israel lobby has pushed policies that are not in the United States' best interests and in fact often encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive behavior.

Inevitably, I rise every morning with two concerns. One is that first invigorating sip of hazelnut coffee. The second is that I will waste precious seconds reading superfluous and chattering news and opinion. But to read something (or someone) which (whom) others have tried to suppress and silence - that is to me the automatic test of substance, authenticity and import. When I find that, even my coffee is unnecessary.