| abstract
| - Alison Weir is an American writer-speaker-analyst on Israel-Palestine. She is executive director of If Americans Knew who speaks and writes about Israel-Palestine, with particular focus on US media coverage of this issue. [citation needed] In February 2001 Weir resigned her position as editor of the Sausalito, California community newspaper, and traveled to the West Bank and Gaza as a freelance reporter. She found a situation largely the reverse of what was being reported by the American media. [citation needed] Disturbed that American citizens were being "misinformed and uninformed on one of the most significant issues affecting them today, and discovering the problem to be systemic, she founded an organization to be directed by Americans without bias and ethnic ties to the region who would research and actively disseminate accurate information to the American public." [citation needed] The organization has conducted six statistical studies of US media organizations, and found that in every case the newspaper or primetime television broadcast entity had reported on Israeli deaths at rates far higher than Palestinian deaths. [citation needed] Other organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Stanford-based media monitoring organization Grade the News found similar patterns.[citation needed] In addition, she has researched and written extensively on US media coverage of Israel-Palstine, including a 10,000 word article in The Link and numerous articles published in CounterPunch and elsewhere. [citation needed] She speaks throughout the US on this issue and has received plaudits from diverse sources:[citation needed] In March of 2004, Weir was inducted into honorary membership of Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The award cited her as a: “Courageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights. The first woman to receive an honorary membership in Phi Alpha history.” [citation needed] In 2003, following participation in a debate on the UC Berkeley campus, she received a widely reported death threat on the organization's voicemail. In 2008 Weir was involved in a minor flap in Greenwich, Connecticut when the town library attempted to cancel two talks scheduled by a local citizen, Greenwich, Connecticut resident John McGillion, in a room at the public library open for public use. The library first tried to cancel the talks on the grounds that a clause in its Meeting Facility Policy allowed the cancellation of talks that are offensive to "public sensitivity," which library officials later admitted did not apply to Ms Weir's talks. In the end the talks went forward and were attended by at least 300 people. [1] Describing the speech, the New York Times wrote: "When the speech ended, Ms. Weir was met with thunderous applause, and across the room there was a widespread sense of satisfaction that someone was saying what needed to be said." The column by Peter Applebome, a columnist for the New York Times, described it as a "skilled presentation" and alleged that it "... mixed fact, purported fact and advocacy to argue not just that the United States was to blame for arming Israeli aggression, but that the war in Iraq was largely the result of neocons with strong ties to Israel supporting Israeli interests." He also wrote: "Still, if the discussion was about Israelis and Palestinians, it was hard to miss the atmospherics in the room as well, the palpable split between Ms. Weir’s supporters, who seemed to hang on every word, and her critics, overwhelmingly Jewish, seething in their seats."
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