Campus Profile - Alison Weir: If Americans Knew

This profile is one in a small collection produced for PRA’s report Constructing Campus Conflict: Antisemitism and Islamophobia on U.S. College Campuses 2007-2011. Figures profiled played significant roles in campus controversies reviewed for that report. In the assessment of our authors, these figures’ campus appearances have done more to inflame existing divisions than to build towards positive alternatives. However, we imply no moral, ideological, or other equivalency. Individual profile authors decided what information was most useful for readers to evaluate their claims, rhetoric, and roles in campus controversies.

Editor’s Note: This profile is different from the other profiles because it was commissioned as a piece of investigative journalism and analysis on an individual for whom there is very little mainstream coverage.

Few political writers today appear in the publications of both the Left and the Far Right. One rare exception is Alison Weir, the founder of If Americans Knew (IAK). Her denunciations of the vast power that Israel and its supporters in the United States allegedly wield resonate on the Far Right with figures like former Klansman and politician David Duke, the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, antisemitic talk radio host Clay Douglas, and the Pacifica Forum at the University of Oregon, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group.

At the same time, she can be found on the Left in the pages of Z Magazine, Project Censored, and CounterPunch. She has been praised by Socialist Worker, broadcast on affiliates of the Pacifica radio network, and spoken at the Left Forum conference.¹

Weir is a regular speaker on college campuses. She has appeared at Harvard Law School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Stanford University, American University, the University of Chicago, Vassar College, and elsewhere. In 2003, she received death threats after she and Hatem Bazian debated with David Meir-Levi and Eric Sirkin at the University of California, Berkeley about how to achieve peace in the Middle East.² Alison Weir blogs at www.alisonweir.org and edits “Israel-Palestine: The Missing Headlines” (http://israel-palestinenews.blogspot. com). While there is no editor listed by name at the site, it seems that she is also editor of the new IAK blog http://  israelpalestineanalysis.wordpress.com. Weir is president of the Council for the National Interest and sometimes hosts its radio show, “Jerusalem Calling.”

At first glance, Weir seems like a typical Palestine solidarity activist. She says that she founded If Americans Knew (IAK) after she visited the Occupied Territories in 2001 and witnessed numerous human rights violations that were not covered in the United States press. IAK is sometimes portrayed as a media watchdog group, and its tagline is “What Every American Needs to Know About Israel-Palestine.”

But a closer inspection of Weir and IAK reveals disturbing elements. The main focus of their work is not on Palestinian conditions or rights, but on the power of the so-called Israel lobby in the United States. Weir describes the U.S. media’s tilt toward Israel as possibly “the most monumental cover-up in media history.”³ While she admits that a number of factors may account for this alleged pro-Israel bias, she consistently targets the Jewish backgrounds of editors and reporters.⁴ Even if they think they are unbiased, she says, unconscious family influences are likely to sway their opinions.⁵

IAK’s criticisms of Zionism and Israel dovetail with traditional antisemitic narratives, and Weir often cites antisemitic writers and publications as her sources. When asked if the work of antisemitic authors including Israel Shamir, Gilad Atzmon, and Kevin MacDonald were truly legitimate, she replied, “Yes. I suggest people read their work for themselves.”⁶

In 2005, IAK analyzed the coverage of deaths in the Israel-Palestine conflict in The New York Times and other newspapers, and concluded the outlets had a pro-Israel bias.⁷ The group met with New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who did not accept their findings.⁸ The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel media-watchdog group, criticized IAK’s report for methodological errors.⁹

In 2008, another controversy erupted after the public library in Greenwich, Connecticut cancelled a talk by Weir that had been scheduled by a member of IAK in one of the library’s public meeting rooms. Under pressure from free-speech advocates such as the American Library Association, the talk was rescheduled. The controversy received national media attention.¹⁰

In 2009, based on stories that had appeared in a Swedish newspaper, Weir published articles in CounterPunch and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Palestinians.¹¹ Weir’s claim was widely denounced as a modern version of the antisemitic blood libel—the myth that Jews use the blood of sacrificed Christian children to make Passover matzos.

Weir says “Israel’s core identity is based on ethnic and religious discrimination by a colonial, immigrant group,” and that it has an “exclusionist identity.”¹² She describes the 1948 founding of Israel as “one of the modern world’s most successful ethnic cleansings,” and a “holocaust” for Palestinians; elsewhere she implies this holocaust continues today.¹³

She has also said that “Israel struck first in all its wars except one. Historically, it was the initiator of conflict.”¹⁴ IAK writers such as Mazin Qumsiyeh, Jeffrey Blankfort [see profile], and Kathy Christison and the late Bill Christison claim that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was planned and executed by groups that are identified as being overwhelmingly Jewish. Weir has been on the board of NewPolicy.org, an offshoot of the New Policy PAC, whose mission is “to work with citizens, lawmakers, and administration officials to implement longstanding American positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the interest of enhancing American security”¹⁵ whose antisemitic website http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com/ includes assertions that Israel was behind the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In one radio interview, Weir also referred to “the significant role that Zionists played in pushing the U.S. into World War I,” and said, “these same groups [are] trying to push us into a war with Iran.”¹⁶

IAK claims that Israel, together with its supporters in the United States, controls many aspects of the U.S. government. Weir says, “The Israel lobby became far more powerful than those who originally tried to oppose it: the State Department, the Pentagon, the oil lobby.”¹⁷ IAK board member Paul Findley (a former Republican congressional representative from Illinois) describes the United States as in “bondage to Israel’s misdeeds.”¹⁸ Weir summarizes the situation by saying, “What Israel says, our media repeat. What Israel demands, our government gives. What Israel wants, its well-greased lobby delivers.”¹⁹

IAK is careful never to blame “the Jews”; instead it consistently refers to subsets of Jews such as “the Zionists,” “the Israel lobby,” or “the neocons.” American neoconservatives in particular are specifically identified as being overwhelmingly Jewish.²⁰ Jewish subgroups are described consistently as elites who subvert national sovereignty. The “dual loyalties” of these subgroups is a common theme on the IAK website. “Neocons” in the United States and “oligarchs” in Russia receive special attention. Weir says that IAK “is opposed to discrimination in all its forms,” and one of her articles is subtitled “Antisemitism is Wrong.” However, the article does not address the issue other than to say that people should not be dissuaded from criticizing Israel because they fear being called antisemitic.²¹ When asked about what constitutes an antisemitic view that she would oppose, she identified statements which refer explicitly and collectively to “the Jews.”²²

IAK narratives are consistent with the antisemitic conspiracisms of the past century, including the claims that Jews are clannish and cabal-like, have dual loyalties, control the media and the government, steal the body parts of non-Jews, and start wars, often in countries where they are a minority and where the wars are against the country’s interests. Following a classic populist narrative, Weir says that the American people must be informed about this situation to start “reclaiming our nation, our principles and our souls.”²³ One email sent by the Council for the National Interest and signed by Weir even deploys one of the most famous antisemitic images, claiming that liberal J Street and the conservative American Israel Public Affairs Committee are “two tentacles of the same lobby.”²⁴

Like many populist and conspiratorial narratives, some of IAK’s information is true and has potentially important things to contribute to public discourse; some of it is misleading, biased, or suffers from serious omissions; and much of it repeats traditional antisemitic conspiracisms. Alison Weir is not a recognized scholar on Middle East affairs, and campus groups and activists working for recognition and rights for Palestinians would be well advised to seek out more legitimate sources of information on the conflict than IAK.