"Right now, this has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from." (Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, on a University of California, Berkeley, TV show called Conversations With History last fall, speaking about the chilling effect of the Israel lobby).