Apparently no one is free from the Israeli lobby’s reach. Nobel Peace Prize winner and anti-apartheid hero Desmond Tutu was recently invited to speak at St. Thomas, a small Minnesota university. After school officials spoke with representatives from some pro-Israeli organizations, they canceled the talk.

Last April, the Justice and Peace Studies program at the university lined up the former Archbishop Tutu for a campus appearance. He agreed to it and immediately caused a buzz on campus. A speaker of this importance does not appear at St. Thomas too often.

Desmond Tutu

Tutu was the chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission — one of the most significant bodies of its kind. He is widely revered as a champion of civil rights and equality, and a moral voice who struggled against enormous odds in apartheid South Africa.

However, well before the program could roll out the red carpet for its esteemed guest, St. Thomas administrators shut his talk down. It was slated for next spring.

Campus officials were “concerned that Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews.”

Though it is not clear whether the school’s leaders took the initiative or if Jewish community leaders did, several conversations convinced the school officials that there was a community “consensus” against his visit.

The local St. Paul/Minneapolis alternative paper City Pages broke the story.

It reported that Doug Hennes, St. Thomas’s vice president for university and government relations, said, “We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy.”

“We’re not saying he’s anti-Semitic. But he’s compared the state of Israel to Hitler and our feeling was that making moral equivalencies (sic) like that are hurtful to some members of the Jewish community.”

The City Pages writer looked at the transcript of his most critical speech, and found nothing to substantiate the allegations that he said anti-Semitic statements or compared Israel to Adolf Hitler. The writer notes that the “transcription clearly suggests his criticism was aimed at the Israeli government.”

Tutu said, “We don’t criticize the Jewish people. We criticize, we will criticize when they need to be criticized, the government of Israel.”

A Jewish professor and several Jewish peace groups were opposed to the idea that opposition to Tutu’s speech represented a “consensus.”

A statement by the Jewish Voice for Peace read “most Jews, whether they agree with him or not, believe he has every right and the moral stature after his years fighting apartheid, to be heard.”

JVP also pointed out that Tutu even gave the commencement speech at a major Jewish institution, Brandeis University.

An adjunct professor within the Justice and Peace Studies program, Marv Davidov, told the newspaper he was “deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this.” He added that, “I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy.”

The cancellation of Tutu’s talk is just one more example of a pressure campaign to silence critics of Israel. Most recently, pro-Israeli activists sought to cancel Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s talk at Columbia University. Other targets have included academics up for tenure, such as Norman Finkelstein and Nadia Abu el-Haj. They also smeared and sought to prevent talks by critics of the U.S. relationship with Israel, including academics John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Tony Judt. The campaigns against former President Jimmy Carter showed little restraint as well.

At the same time there is a growing rift within the Jewish community between hard-line supporters of Israel and those who believe critical distance is necessary for peace, as well as for Israel’s survival. While this debate is a heated one, it was for long subtle and largely kept out of the public’s view. Internal dissent against the pro-Israel establishment which is running many Jewish organizations is beginning to expose the myth of a Jewish consensus on Israel.

That is not to say this internal fissure is a guarantee, but each objectionable act of censorship is likely to open the debate a bit further.