David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. He has posted an interesting account of the censorship of the AJC's weekly radio ad by the New York Times-owned radio station WQXR:

On behalf of AJC, I do a weekly national 60-second radio spot. The time is purchased as any advertisement would be. For the past nearly seven years, it has been broadcast across the United States on the CBS radio network, on hundreds of stations, without incident.

Earlier this year, we expanded the reach by adding in the New York area WQXR, a popular classical music station owned by the New York Times.

For the week of March 31, here was the text to be aired:

Fifteen seconds. Imagine you had fifteen seconds to find shelter from an incoming missile. Fifteen seconds to locate your children, help an elderly relative, assist a disabled person to find shelter.

That's all the residents of Sderot and neighboring Israeli towns have.

Day or night, the sirens go on. Fifteen seconds later, the missiles, fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza, hit. They could hit a home, a school, a hospital. Their aim is to kill and wound and demoralize.

Imagine yourself in that situation.

The sirens blast. 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The time to seek shelter has ended. The missiles hit.

This is what Israelis experience daily. But, amazingly, they refuse to be cowed. Help us help those Israelis. Visit ajc.org.

The spot was broadcast several times, as is customary, on the CBS radio network, but WQXR refused to do so.

Here’s the written explanation from Tom Bartunek, president of New York Times Radio and general manager of WQXR:

”In my judgement several elements of this spot are outside our bounds of acceptability. First, the opening line— `Imagine you had fifteen seconds to find shelter from an oncoming missile’—does not make clear that the potential target of the missile is not our listening area, and as a consequence, runs the risk of raising anxiety in a misleading way. Second, the description of the missiles as arriving `day or night’ and `daily’ is also subject to challenge as being misleading, at least to the degree that reasonable people might be troubled by the absence of any acknowledgement of reciprocal Israeli military actions. Finally, in my judgement the `countdown’ device and the general tone of the message do not meet our guidelines for decorum.”

Stunning, above all, is the reference to "the absence of any acknowledgement of reciprocal Israeli military actions.”

In other words, according to Bartunek’s logic, the only way to broadcast the plight of Sderot’s residents over the airwaves is to equate Israel’s right of self-defense with Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s right to strike Israel at will.

Harris proceeds to recount another incident of censorship by Bloomberg Radio of the AJC advertisement scheduled to appear a week before the recent incident with WQXR.

Harris places his argument in the context of the allegation by Jimmy Carter, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Tony Judt, et al. that criticism of Israel is stifled by "the Jewish Lobby." They have yet to produce evidence as telling in support of their allegation as the incidents recounted by Harris that belie it.