Here is a crazy story about pro-Israel groups using private and government security forces to suppress free speech in the United States. The incident took place at the Kansas City Public Library last May, but became news in the last week.

On May 9, Dennis Ross, the longtime US government official on the Middle East who has been called Israel’s lawyer (and who has said that American Jews “need to be advocates” for Israel and not for Palestinians), gave a speech at the Kansas City Public Library about Truman and Israel. The speech was sponsored by the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, among others, and the JCF insisted on extra security for the event because of a hate-crime, the shooting at the Jewish Community Foundation two years before that left three dead.

But when Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, a documentarian, rose to ask Ross a critical question, then tried to follow up, he was rushed by a private security officer. The library’s programming director, Steve Woolfolk, interceded on Rothe-Kushel’s behalf. Ultimately both Woolfolk and Rothe-Kushel were handcuffed and arrested in the library lobby, by an off-duty Kansas City police officer– who was also hired for the event by the JCF. Rothe-Kushel characterizes the arrest as an “assault,” and notes that Woolfolk suffered an injury.

The story is breaking now, it seems, because the Kansas City Public Library wanted to keep the whole incident on the q.t., but the Kansas City police insisted on pressing ahead with the charges.

Rothe-Kushel told me today that the case exposes the “nexus between the United States and Israeli security state.” Both the private security guard who grabbed him and the Kansas City police detective who charged him that night have received training in counter-terrorism from Israeli officials in visits to Israel.

Rothe-Kushel says that the private security officer, Blair Hawkins, is a security officer for the Jewish Community Foundation. He speculates that Hawkins, who has extensive national security experience, got the job through a security arm of the Israel lobby called SCN, the Secure Community Network, which describes itself in this way:

“The national homeland security initiative of The Jewish Federations of North America & the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.”

Now let’s go back to the scene of the “crime.” Ross’s speech was connected to his pro-Israel book, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama.

This American Libraries account quotes Woolfolk on the decision to allow private security:

Woolfolk told AL that the JCF came up with the idea of providing security for the talk. “The library, on occasion and usually at the speaker’s request,” Woolfolk said, “agrees to providing extra security.” But in this case, the JCF arranged for private security guards as well as off-duty police officers to be present, in part because of sensitivity in the region over the April 2014 shootings by a lone gunman at a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, that left three people dead. At the end of Ross’s talk, Rothe-Kushel went to the audience microphone to ask Ross a question, in the process stating that the US and Israel have engaged in state-sponsored terrorism. Ross answered, but Rothe-Kushel “was clearly not happy with his response to that assertion,” Woolfolk said.