Tyranny comes in all shapes and sizes.

Guest:  Carl Strock, journalist and author of “From D'burg to Jerusalem: The Unlikely Rise and Awful Fall of a Small-Town Newsman,” talks about the role of advertisers like Price Chopper in controlling what stories get printed in local papers.

Carl is a great guy. I can tell from talking to him for 15 minutes on the radio.

He says, and writes exactly what he thinks, a formula that worked for 25 years at his small town newspaper in Schnectady, NY.

Then a Jewish peace group, J Street, persuaded him to visit the West Bank. On his return, he couldn't stop writing about the humiliation and suffering of the Palestinians. "I used to think they were terrorists" he told us. That was before he stood at a checkpoint with them for hours in the hot sun.

The Israeli Lobby soon found his writing distasteful and branded him an anti-Semite. A large advertiser in his newspaper, Price Chopper, joined forces with a local synagogue and some national Zionist organizations to scare his paper into limiting what he could write on the subject. Censored for the first time in his career, he retired.

The Lobby preaches racial hatred of the Palestinians, and uses the established Jewish Religion and wealthy business interests to throttle anyone with an opposing view. Think they are not powerful? There isn't a person in Congress who dares criticize Israel, and few who even have the courage to question the Lobby's relentless efforts to push America into another war.  

Tyranny comes in all shapes and sizes.