The organization, If Americans Knew, is indistinguishable from its founder, free-lance journalist Alison Weir. Weir became a self-styled expert on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict when she visited the Territories for the first time in the summer of 2001. Struck by the fact that she “found a situation largely the reverse of what was being reported by the American media,”[1] she formed her non-profit corporation to expose the media bias against the Palestinians, what she considered a “cover-up of appalling proportions.”[2] Weir began producing and distributing educational materials and has lectured widely throughout the US, at campuses, churches, libraries, and on Capitol Hill.[3] If Americans Knew seems to be Weir’s one-person operation, but her daughter Sarah, a recent college graduate, now also works with her.

Be prepared when she comes to your campus. She claims to be exposing media bias but in fact, she peddles an unusually virulent anti-Israel message. Even she admits that “It is hard not to sound fanatic, over-wrought, biased. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians’ lives too horrible to write about reasonably.”[4]

When Weir lectures, she makes inflammatory assertions in a sad, almost monotone voice that makes them seem like incontrovertible facts. She also packs a strong emotional punch through anecdotes and photographs about Palestinian Arab suffering. As one student reported, Weir’s “talk was full of pictures of dead children; most of them were unexplained, just said to be results of Israeli soldiers.….The whole talk was designed to make you feel too bad or too ashamed to question any of her words, no matter how blatantly full of lies they were. I felt uncomfortable raising my hand and telling her that what she said about the history of Israel was all lies…”[5]

Weir claims that her materials are objective because she and her organization“are directed by Americans without bias and ethnic ties to the region”[6] and because they are not “pressured by powerful special interest groups.”[7] As these thinly veiled allusions to Jewish control of the media suggest, Weir and her organization have an overwhelming bias: they embrace the Arab view of the conflict and its demonization of Israel. One of their new board members, former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley, has been one of the most outspoken anti-Israel advocates and was dubbed “Israel’s number one enemy on Capitol Hill” before he was ousted from office in 1983.[8]

They also have an explicit agenda: persuading Americans to end all support for Israel. “We believe strongly that if Americans knew the truth about Israel and Palestine-about the massive amount of our tax money that is being given away to Israel, and about the human cost of Israel’s American-financed militarism-they would demand an immediate re-thinking of our policies in this region.”[9]

Weir’s special contribution is her effort to make Americans feel guilty. She argues that US support for Israel “makes us accomplice to war crimes and an accessory to oppression….We [Americans]are driving the violence in this region.”[10] She presumes that we are not doing so willingly. Rather, media bias has “manipulated” us.[11] If we knew the true facts, we would demand an end to support for Israel. Her mission is to spread what she considers to be the facts.

Weir’s inflammatory assertions and distortions are matched only by her lack of information about the history of Israel and of the conflict. Consider some of her statements:

• “You call this…[Israel’s] ‘War of Independence.’ Please explain this to me. Independence from whom? From the farmers whose ancestors had tilled the land for centuries?….Independence from humanity? From morality? From normality? From everyone else in the world?”[12]

• “People who say there are two sides to this ‘conflict’ are full of bs….Here there is the brutalizer and the brutalized. It’s not complicated.” [13]

• “It is hard not to sound fanatic, over-wrought, biased. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians’ lives too horrible to write about reasonably.”[14]

• “When a rare, crazed, would-be freedom-fighter escapes this prison and tries to strike his oppressor, we need to read about the prison he exploded out of. Rather than an ‘inexplicable, fanatical terrorist,’ we would see what we had helped create with our aid to Israel-a terrorized victim who has tragically but inexplicably turned to violence himself.”[15]

• “Empowered by American money, Israel is occupying land that does not belong to it.”[16]

• “When people say Israel has a right to exist, it means that Israel has a right to discriminate.”[17]

• “Americans have to stop this [supporting Israel]. Israel will keep shooting kids in the back until we all say, Enough.”[18]

• “You’ve called ‘anti-Semite’ once too often. You’ve pressured one too many newspapers, one too many universities, one too many mayors…”[19]

• “This poverty [in the Territories] has not happened by accident, Weir argued. ‘I was seeing newly, artificially, purposefully created poverty. Poverty being created by America through its support of a regime that is consciously, and again, quite effectively, squeezing out people it does not want around.’”[20]

• “The U.S. State Department has yet to impose any diplomatic sanctions whatsoever against a government whose "apology" for one of its soldiers crushing a young, peaceful American student has consisted of calling it "regrettable”…The American media have yet to accord this horror the attention it would normally merit, if it had been done by any other country on earth, including the U.S. government.”[21]

• “Historians have since written that the fact that Israel was able to attack a US ship (the Liberty) and kill and maim American servicemen, with virtually no consequences, convinced Israeli hardliners that Israel could, whenever it wanted, get away with murder.”[22]

• “[Weir] told me that Israeli soldiers are invincible-that they are bulletproof. I wasn't sure if I heard her correctly, so I asked her, "You mean people never come up to them and shoot them and kill them?" and she said no, they have armor, they are bulletproof.” Alex Scheinker, student at Washington University[23]

---