Meet Alison Weir, self-proclaimed journalist, savior of the Palestinian people and anti-Semite extraordinaire. Around 100 people had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing Weir speak on the night of Nov. 11 in Harris Hall. But this was no ordinary lecture.

Weir brought shame to the journalist's trade that night as she regaled her sorrowful journey through "Palestine," witnessing the racist treatment and brutal occupation of the innocent, loving Palestinians by the Israel Defense Force. This high-tech presentation was accompanied by a slide show of photos Weir collected during her one month in Gaza and the West Bank-pictures of children on respirators, broken homes and caring families.

The speech went further than just calling for an end of Israeli occupation or cutting off foreign aid to Israel. (For the record, she did suggest both.) Weir began with a brief overview of Zionism from the late 19th century until the creation of the State of Israel. Her presentation was filled with lie after lie, distortion after distortion, and propaganda after propaganda.

Zionism, Weir claimed, was a movement founded by Jews who wanted to live in Palestine and forcibly remove the inhabitants of the land. False!

The true origin begins with a French journalist named Theodore Herzl. He had been covering the Dreyfus Affair, in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer, was framed, tried and convicted of treason because he was Jewish. Herzl understood that anti-Semitism in the world would never dissipate and the Jewish people needed a homeland-a refuge for any Jew fleeing persecution and oppression.

Also, the Jewish National Fund provided the money which legally bought every piece of swamp land that the "evil Zionists" developed in Palestine.

What Weir refers to as the Arab Uprising of 1929, most legitimate historians call the Hebron Massacre of 1929. On a Sabbath day in August, 67 Jewish seminary students and families were murdered in cold blood while they learned their holy texts and recited the Sabbath prayers. If that is an uprising that "caused deaths on both sides," than the Jews and the Nazis worked together during the Holocaust in some grand conspiracy.

According to Weir, during World War II there was a secret "Zionist-Nazi" co-conspiracy to relocate the Jews of Europe to Palestine in an effort to flood the country with an enormous Jewish population. Words cannot describe such a dehumanizing, bigoted and ignorant statement.

The Jewish Agency tried its best to evacuate as many Jews from Nazi Germany in order to save them from Gestapo beatings, ghetto liquidations, death camp gas chambers and SS firing squads. Between 1933 and 1939, when Adolph Hitler closed the borders, 350,000 Jews were evacuated to the United States and Palestine. To even suggest such a conspiracy shows a complete disregard for the millions slaughtered by Hitler, as well as a clear anti-Semitic agenda. Perhaps it would interest Ms. Weir to know that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was very close friends with Hitler and visited him several times throughout the war.

Weir suddenly decided to cut short the history lesson "for lack of time" and skip ahead to the current Israeli barbarism in "Palestine." However, she neglected many important facts because of this shortcut. The audience deserved to learn that in 1947 the United Nations ratified a partition plan for Palestine-establishing a Jewish state, an Arab state and Jerusalem as an international city. She also forgot to mention that Israel accepted that plan, the Arabs did not and five Arab countries attacked Israel moments after David Ben-Gurion (who of course was one of the conspiracy masterminds, according to Weir) declared independence.

The other issue that Weir entirely skirted was how the Palestinian refugee problem came about. Could it be that when anti-Israel Arabs refused to live as citizens under an Israeli flag and returned to their respective homelands, the Arab countries barred them from entering and instead forced them into refugee camps?

Does she realize that the Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank existed from 1949-1967, before Israel won the territory in battle during the Six Day War?

It's fascinating to note that the living conditions in East Jerusalem actually improved with Israeli rule-when the IDF entered the city in 1967 they found sewage in the streets and disease everywhere.

Apparently these facts do not enter into the non-biased journalism that Weir practices.

But even if none of that seems false or misleading, what Weir said next cannot be rationalized or excused. She claimed that in the Apartheid State of Israel today there are military checkpoints that sometimes deny Palestinians permission to pass. According to her "personal accounts," the Israeli soldiers have flashlights at night that point at you and motion you in different directions-these she referred to as "death points" because some Palestinians don't receive the right flashlight motion and are killed. The parallel that she is drawing is evil, blatantly false and a major affront to anyone who was victimized by the Holocaust.

In the death camps, the Nazi guards would motion people into two lines, one line of women, children and the elderly and the other line of strong, working-age men. The first line would go through one gate leading to the concentration camp and the other line would go through a second gate leading to extermination. IDF checkpoints that ensure that no terrorist can pass from the West Bank to Israel to mass-murder innocent civilians is in no way analogous to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Only a sick, perverted mind would make such a connection. A mind like Weir's.

It's not journalism to spend a month with Palestinian "victims" of Israeli brutality and not spend a month with the parents of the teenagers who were blown up at a Tel Aviv disco. It's not journalism to attend the funeral of a member of Islamic Jihad (of which she showed pictures and then referred to the black masks worn by the terrorists as ritualistic) and not grieve with the children of a 39-year-old mother ambushed and killed on a highway when coming home from work.

Medill sent out an e-mail on its listserv to all students encouraging them to attend the event because Weir was labeled a journalist. For such a highly esteemed school of journalism to encourage students to attend the lecture of a poor journalist and high-quality bigot calls into question the values and principles it instills in its students.

What's the matter with the Northwestern community these days? Pat Buchanan gets a candlelight vigil protest and a rabid anti-Semite like Alison Weir gets free publicity from the school.