Alison Weir (journalist)

Alison Weir is an American journalist. She is the founder and executive director of the non-profit organization If Americans Knew (IAK) and president of another US-based non-profit, the Council for the National Interest (CNI). Both organizations are concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is the author of "Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.^[1]

Weir has described the founding of Israel as a “holocaust.”^[2] She has called Israel a “violently imposed, ethnically based nation-state,”^[3] and has compared it to the 9/11 terrorists.^[4]

She has been criticized by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, which has called her “a prominent voice in the anti-Israel movement,”^[5] and by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which has called her reports “preposterous” and “unreliable.”

Activism

Weir traces her interest in the Israeli-Palestinian issue back to the autumn of 2000, when the second intifada began. At the time she was “the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Sausalito, California,” and noticed that news reports on the conflict “were highly Israeli-centric.” Wanting access to “full information,” she “began to look for additional reports on the Internet.” After months of study, she decided that “this was perhaps the most covered-up story I had ever seen” and quit her job in order to visit the West Bank and Gaza, where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. After returning to the U.S., she founded If Americans Knew.^[6]

If Americans Knew

Weir founded If Americans Knew after her visit to the West Bank and Gaza during the second intifada in 2001.^[7] Weir describes IAK as “an organization that provides information on topics of importance that are substantially misreported or unreported in the US media” and that, in particular, analyzes media coverage of Israel-Palestine.^[6]

IAK, a 501(c)3 non-profit based in Washington state, describes its mission as follows: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation. It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.”^[8]

New York Times ad

On December 16, 2012, IAK placed an ad in the New York Times featuring four maps which purport to show the Palestinians' progressive loss of land to Israel between 1946 and 2010.^[9]

Council for the National Interest

Council for the National Interest banner at End the Occupation of Palestine rally at the U.S. Capitol, June 10, 2007.

In June 2010, Weir was named to succeed Eugene Bird, the longtime leader of the Council for the National Interest (CNI).^[5]

CNI describes itself as seeking to “encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values, protects our national interests, and contributes to a just solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is CNI’s goal to restore a political environment in America in which voters and their elected officials are free from the undue influence and pressure of foreign countries and their partisans.”^[10]

Writings

Weir has contributed to the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, CounterPunch, The Link, and other publications.^[7]

In a February 2009 op-ed for an Oregon newspaper, Weir argued that Israel was created through ruthless expulsion of over three-quarters of a million Christians and Muslims from their homes and ancestral land....Imagine how we would feel if a group moved to Oregon to create a Jewish-only state and then proceeded to push out over 96 percent not of this ethnicity.”^[11]

Weir wrote in an April 2009 op-ed that the founding of Israel was responsible for many of the woes of the Middle East, charging that it is “as though 9/11 attackers had not only destroyed the Twin Towers but had also remained occupying Manhattan.” She maintained that “in Israel's founding war of 1947-49, Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and expelled 800,000 people.”^[4]

In 2009, Weir published several articles and videos in which she reiterated a Swedish newspaper's charge that Israel was harvesting the internal organs of Palestinians.^[3][12][13]

Weir responded in a January 2010 article to a New York Times op-ed in which the rock star Bono had lamented that “places like the Palestinian territories” had yet to find “their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.” Weir maintained that the Palestinian territories do indeed have their Gandhis and Kings, but that “these Palestinian Gandhis and Kings are being killed and imprisoned” by Israelis.^[3]

In June 2010, Weir defended senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who had been forced to retire after making what Weir called “allegedly anti-Semitic remarks.” After detailing a series of recent purported atrocities by Israel, Weir complained that “the rage we see in the U.S. media is directed against none of this” but rather against “'anti-Israel' words spoken by 89-year-old Helen Thomas,” during whose lifetime, Weir wrote, “Israel has ethnically cleansed over a million people, replaced them with colonists from around the world, committed dozens of massacres, tortured thousands of people, killed and maimed untold numbers of children, mangled limbs, and committed outrages on women, old people, the weak and the infirm.” Thomas had been criticized for saying that Israelis “should go home” to “Germany, Poland, America, and everywhere else,” but Weir argued that today's Poland is undergoing “a vibrant Jewish revival,” that “in recent years more Jews have chosen to immigrate to Germany than to Israel,” and that “Thomas’s call for colonists to return to America...is far from outrageous given that a great many West Bank settlers are from the U.S.”^[3]

Weir took the 2011 Egyptian uprising as an occasion to write an article examining what she described as the Israeli role in the developments in Egypt.^[3]

In March 2011, after three Israeli children were slaughtered in their home by Palestinians, Weir wrote an article in which she maintained that the children's family lived in “an illegal Jewish-only settlement on stolen Palestinian land” that is “largely populated by fanatic Jewish extremists, many of whom believe that the killing of non-Jewish infants is religiously permitted, and sometimes mandated.” She also argued that U.S. media are concerned about the death of Israeli children but show no interest in the death of Palestinian children. She concluded the article with a long list of Palestinian children purportedly killed by the IDF.^[14]

Weir commented in an April 2011 article that the Sacramento Bee had refused to run an op-ed by her arguing “that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis.”^[15]

In an October 2011 article by Weir, entitled “The Real Story of How Israel Was Created,” she rejected the claim “that the UN created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the US governmental establishment supported it,” and described the establishment of Israel as following upon “a series of massacres and expulsions” and acts of “ethnic cleansing” carried out by “the pro-Israel movement.”^[16]

After the magazine American History refused to run a CNI advertisement because of what it considered the organization's anti-Israeli bias, Weir investigated the magazine's publishers, the Weider History Group, and, in a 2012 article for Counterpunch, charged that they have built a “massive and lucrative empire based on bodybuilding and related products: an empire that has been investigated and convicted for using false claims to sell potentially dangerous 'nutritional supplements' and for publishing 'obscene' magazines, run by powerful people with powerful friends in high places who’ve opposed the regulation of such supplements.” Weir noted the publishers' ties to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Orrin Hatch and noted that their foundation, the Joe Weider Foundation, had awarded grants to American Friends Of Aish HaTorah, Aish HaTorah being “an Israeli organization that opposes Jewish assimilation and promotes Israel in the United States” and that “has been connected to the production of pseudo-documentaries promoting Islamophobia.” She further complained that most of the articles about Israel and Palestine at the publishers' website, HistoryNet, are “Israel-centric” and “often extol the Israeli military.”^[17]

In a February 2012 article, Weir reported that the last five New York Times bureau chiefs covering Israel and Palestine had been Jewish, while the Times had once “specifically avoided assigning Jewish reporters to cover Israel out of concern that such journalists would have an inherent conflict of interest,” this policy had been “reversed in 1979 after Abe Rosenthal became the paper’s executive editor and explicitly decided to choose Jewish journalists for the position.” Weir noted that the newly appointed bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, “speaks what she calls 'functional Hebrew' but no Arabic,” attended a Jewish summer camp in New Hampshire “that has an Israeli flag at the top of its website and boasts of its “strong Israeli programming,” and had “an upbringing that appears to have included considerable immersion in Zionist mythology.”^[18]

In 2014 she published Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel, (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), described by former U.S. Senator James Abourezk as 'provocative' and 'scholarly, yet readable'.^[19]

Professional activities

Weir has given talks at numerous educational institutions, including Harvard Law School, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Yale, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Naval Postgraduate Institute. She has spoken four times at the Asia Media Summit in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and has twice given briefings on Capitol Hill.^[10] She has also given presentations at the Jerusalem Media Center Conference in the West Bank.^[7]

Honors and awards

In 2004, she became the first woman to receive an honorary membership in the Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The citation described her as a “[c]ourageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights.”^[10]

Weir has also won awards from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR).^[7]

Criticism

Anti-Defamation League

The Anti-Defamation League describes Weir as “a prominent voice in the anti-Israel movement” and criticizes her for using images they consider anti-Semitic.^[5]

The Guardian

Andy Newman, in the Guardian, criticized Weir's article "Israeli Organ Harvesting, The New "Blood Libel?" for defending claims about Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinians in Gaza to harvest their organs.^[20]

CAMERA

CAMERA has argued that the positions and statements of Weir and IAK raise "serious doubts about the ability of her organization to credibly comment on American media coverage of the Israeli-Arab conflict." CAMERA criticizes Weir and her organization for parroting "discredited claims that Israel attacks Palestinians with mysterious poison gas," calling Israel "an apartheid nation," describing Palestinian violence as "a legitimate right and...moral duty" and referring to the founding of Israel as "the start of a 'holocaust".

Reporting on a 2005 IAK study which concluded that the New York Times paid far more attention to Israeli than to Palestinian deaths, CAMERA complained that “[t]he bulk of the study is based only on the headline and first paragraph – often just one sentence – of New York Times news reports, and completely ignores the remaining text of the articles....Only by ignoring most of the news coverage in this way can Weir reach her conclusions.” CAMERA argued that “the Times does not mislead readers about the number of fatalities sustained by both sides. If anything, it would be more accurate to say that such casualty breakdowns downplay Israeli losses – readers are informed that more Palestinians than Israelis have died, but are not told that most of the Israeli victims were non-combatants targeted by Palestinians, whereas Palestinian fatalities were overwhelmingly combatants or Palestinians killed by other Palestinians.” CAMERA claimed that Weir's statement “that most Palestinian deaths' are never reported by the Times at all” was false, “again basing this contention only on the headline and first sentence or two of news stories.”

CAMERA suggested that “Weir's pseudoscientific study and absurd conclusions are not so surprising in light of her history of distortion.” Citing her claim that “Israel has a record of attacking its neighbors - mounting massive invasions of surrounding territory in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1982,” CAMERA countered that “in 1982, 1967 and 1956, Israel invaded its neighbors only after repeated cross border killings, threats and acts of war aimed at the country from those neighbors.” Quoting Weir's assertion that the Six-Day War was a “Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack on Egypt,” CAMERA called it “laughable,” given that she “ignores the fact that before Israel's preemptive strike, Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers meant to separate the two sides, provocatively massed its troops on its border with Israel, threatened to destroy the country, and, in an act of war, illegally blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat. Cutting off access to Eilat by blockading the Gulf of Aqaba, an international waterway, was a casus belli under international law. In other words, even before the first shot was fired in 1967, Egypt had started the war.” Weir's claim that Israel had “attacked” and “invaded” its neighbors in 1948 was “even more preposterous,” according to CAMERA, given that “it was Israel that was illegally attacked and invaded by its neighbors” in that year.^[2]

In 2008 CAMERA launched a campaign to alter Wikipedia articles to support the Israeli side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The campaign suggested that pro-Israeli editors should pretend to be interested in other topics until elected as administrators. Once administrators they were to misuse their administrative powers to suppress pro-Palestinian editors and support pro-Israel editors.[17] Some members of this conspiracy were banned by Wikipedia administrators

References