Thursday evening (July 24th, 2003) Alison Weir gave a talk at the Unitarian Church on Charleston Road in Palo Alto about the lies built into the public understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian issue in this area. The room could have held something like 200 to 300 people, so the hundred or so that showed up looked like a small crowd. Alison Weir turned out to be a very professional journalist with a nice slide show containing graphs and pictures that amplified the words in her presentation very well.

Ms. Weir began her talk by explaining that she was a Journalist who had done a survey of the coverage of the Mideast conflict between 2001 and 2002 in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, and then compared that with statistics on the deaths from credible peace organizations on the ground in the middle east. What she found was that most Israeli deaths were covered in western media, but only a small percentage of Palestinian deaths were. Because of this, it was easy to get the idea that Jews are dying about as often as Palestinians, whereas the truth is that Palestinians are dying something like three times as fast.

After finding these results, she shared them with editorial committees at the paper that were willing to listen to her words. It has not had a significant impact on coverage at this point. Much more recently, as a result of her grassroots campaign to get the word out, they have had some impact on other people. There are now similar surveys planned by volunteers in Washington, DC., Connecticut, and a number of other places (other volunteers are welcome to join the movement). She hopes there will be less biased coverage in the future as a result of these efforts.

Alison decided to spend a month wandering around Israel and Palestine to find out more for herself, which she did in early 2001. She showed us many pictures of Palestinians that she met. She reported hearing gunfire many, many times. Except for shots fired at funerals and weddings, almost all of it was Jewish settlers firing at unarmed Palestinians. She attended the funeral of one mother of teenage boys that was killed on her way home from the market. There were also pictures of other funerals she attended, both of which were teenage boys shot while apparently throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Alison explained that there may have been lulls reported in the fighting in our newspapers, but she did not experience any of them. Also, while she was over there she submitted stories about what she saw, and none of them made it into the newspapers here.

Among the pictures she showed us were many of wounded boys. Some had gunshot wounds that had paralyzed them, others had things like one eye destroyed. During the Q&A period I asked about that one. She explained that statistically the wounded were a much higher percentage of the total than you would expect based on typical battlefield results through history. Alison suggested that maybe the Israelis had decided to implement a "shoot to wound" policy. Her reasoning was that they had figured out that deaths always get reported at least as part of a number mentioned rarely, but wounded weren't at all. The oppression was handled that way to hide what was really going on from people that just follow the news. Ms. Weir said several times that there is plenty of information that can be found by digging for what is really going on.

Tian Harter

For more info please visit http://www.ifamericansknew.org

I gave Alison Weir a Pennsylvania quarter.