Quite a brouhaha has erupted over the decision of Poland’s government, citing its own policy and concerned phone calls from, among others, “representatives of American diplomacy and intelligentsia,” to cancel, earlier this month, a talk that a professor at New York University, Tony Judt, had been scheduled to give to an outside group at the Polish Consulate in New York. Mr. Judt was to talk on the “Israel Lobby”; in a recent appearance and an article, he has called for a full and open debate, without charges of anti-Semitism, on the claim that such a lobby controls the press and inveigled America into the Iraq war. For the cancellation of his talk the American academic left has decided to blame, of all people, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League.

What a strange, albeit all-too-typical fantasy — that the Anti-Defamation League or Mr. Foxman somehow manipulate or control the workings of the Polish government. How insulting to the Poles themselves, who have a free and democratic government that is fully capable of making its own decisions.Mr. Foxman was quoted in The New York Sun’s original news article as saying, “We had nothing to do with the cancellation.” He said to us, and we reported at the time, “That was their decision…We didn’t ask for it.”

Yet the assembled left — led by Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago but including also Ian Buruma, Timothy Garton Ash, Franklin Foer, Jim Sleeper, Gideon Rose, and Rashid Khalidi — are now, in an open letter, calling both Mr. Foxman and the Polish diplomats, in essence, liars. Their accusations are based, at least in part, on the statements of a woman named Patricia Huntington, who originally sought to blame the ADL but who has since retracted her accusations, stating in a letter to us, “I had no idea what actually transpired between the ADL and the Consulate General.”

Many of the same left-wing intellectuals who are rushing to sign the open letter to attack the Anti-Defamation League and to defend Tony Judt’s supposedly endangered freedom of speech were nowhere to be found when it came time to defend, say, the freedom of speech of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or of the editors in Denmark or in America who published the Mohammed cartoons. Nor have they thought through, apparently, that in canceling the event, the Polish government was making a statement of its own, one that the Poles have every much a right to make as Mr. Judt does.

We interpreted the Poles as saying, in essence, that it would be inappropriate for a country on whose soil much of the Holocaust took place to host, in its own consulate, a speaker who has suggested the replacement of Israel with a bi-national state and who has embraced a paper that accuses a vast “Israel Lobby” of manipulating the press and entangling America in the Iraq war. Poland’s decision in respect of Mr. Judt is a sign of the value it places on the Jewish State, with which it has built warm relations, and is welcomed by these columns and by many New Yorkers. It is a sign of comprehension that the war against the Jews that claimed so many Jews in Poland in the last century rages yet today, and of the Polish people’s determination, this time around, to be on the right side of that war.