Alison Weir Tells Marin Audience “What The Media Leave Out”

By Elaine Pasquini


	Alison Weir points to charts illustrating the unbalanced reporting on Israeli and Palestinian deaths (Staff Photo E. Pasquini).

IF AMERICANS Knew (IAK) founder Alison Weir gave a powerful presentation titled “Israel-Palestine: What the Media Leave Out” on Feb. 5. Her talk was hosted by 14 Friends of Palestine, Marin, at the Meditation Center nestled high in the hills of Fairfax, California.

Using a PowerPoint presentation, the award-winning journalist explained her organization’s statistical analysis of American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Weir said, 165 Israelis and 549 Palestinians were killed in the conflict between September 2000 and September 2001. Her group’s study found that the major television evening newscasts reported Israeli deaths at a ratio of three to four times greater than reports of Palestinians killed. In addition, Israeli deaths frequently would have a prominent follow-up report, whereas Palestinian deaths were rarely reported even once.

An even far greater distortion occurred in the media’s reporting of children’s deaths, Weir continued. During the same time period 28 Israeli children and 131 Palestinian children died, but primetime news programs reported the deaths of Israeli children at a rate up to 14 times greater than the number of Palestinian children. And, according to IAK’s ongoing studies, this disturbing pattern of inaccurate, lopsided and biased reporting is continuing.

In 2004, Weir related, during a period when eight Israeli children and 179 Palestinian children died, The New York Times reported Israeli children’s deaths at a rate seven times greater than Palestinian children’s deaths.

Another important issue grossly underreported by the mainstream media, Weir pointed out, is U.S. financial aid to Israel. “We give Israel at least $10 million per day of our tax money,” she said. “It is off the charts of our foreign expenditures.” If loan subsidies and weapons programs are included, she estimated the figure would be closer to $15 million per day. According to her study, during one six-month period the San Francisco Chronicle published 251 articles on Israel-Palestine, but only three made even a brief mention of aid given to Israel by American taxpayers, and none mentioned the enormous dollar figure, she observed.

In briefly recounting the history of the conflict, Weir also discussed the Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day War. The deliberate attack, which killed 34 Americans and wounded 172, received virtually no media or governmental attention, Weir noted.

At the end of the program, guests viewed a fascinating four-minute clip of Weir’s uncompleted documentary with the working title, “If Americans Knew,” scheduled to be released the end of this year.

IAK statistical charts and reports on news coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and The New York Times are available at <http://www.ifamericansknew.org>.

Frank Lindh Says His Son Is Not a Traitor


Frank Lindh speaking at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club (Staff Photo E. Pasquini).

“This is the story of a decent and honorable young man who embarked on a spiritual quest and became the focus of the grief and anger of the entire nation for an event in which he had no part,” Frank Lindh told a Commonwealth Club audience Jan. 19. Occasionally seething with anger and at times choking back tears, Lindh, father of Muslim convert John Walker Lindh, said his son is not a traitor and presented his argument for President George W. Bush to commute John’s 20-year prison term.

John Lindh’s unusual odyssey, which took him from Arabic studies in Yemen to a fortress prison in northern Afghanistan and ended in a Victorville, California federal prison, began in 1997 in Marin County, California, where the Catholic-raised teen converted to Islam at age 16. A year later he traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and eventually traveled to Pakistan for further Islamic study. In May 2001, barely age 20, he crossed into Afghanistan to fight the warlords of the Northern Alliance as a soldier in the Taliban army.

At that time, prior to the events of 9/11, Washington had established a relationship with the rogue regime in Kabul. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell even announced a $43 million grant to the Taliban government for opium eradication. “What happened, unfortunately for John, is that the United States made an abrupt change after the 9/11 attacks,” Lindh explained. “We switched sides. John was on the ground there when that happened. He certainly didn’t go to Afghanistan to do anything against America. He never fought against America. He never held a gun against an American soldier.”

His son went to Afghanistan to help struggling fellow Muslims, Lindh insisted. Instead John Lindh was taken into custody by U.S. military forces Dec. 1, 2001, from the Qala Jangi fortress prison near Mazar-e-Sharif, the military headquarters of the barbarous warlord Northern Alliance Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, who remains a controversial figure in current Afghan politics.

The elder Lindh struggled not to break down in tears as he described his son’s treatment at the hands of U.S. forces. “John’s bullet wound was left festering and untreated,” he said. “He was blindfolded and bound hand and foot with tight plastic strips that caused severe pain. He was stripped naked, duct-taped and bound naked to a stretcher, then left in the cold in an unheated metal shipping container on the desert floor in Afghanistan.”

Lindh blasted the media, particularly a CNN reporter who interviewed his wounded son while he was carried near death on a stretcher, dazed under the effects of morphine. After that interview, “there was not a single major newspaper or television station that did not disparage our son,” he exclaimed. “He was presumed guilty of the worst sort of crime.”

Prominent governmental officials, including President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft made vicious verbal attacks against his son, the distraught father noted. Even Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) labeled the younger Lindh a traitor, inflaming public opinion prior to the trial.

The government, however, eventually dropped 10 terrorism charges against John Lindh, who on July 15, 2002 pleaded guilty only to violating anti-Taliban economic sanctions imposed under the Clinton administration and to carrying a rifle as an Afghan soldier.

Attorney James Brosnahan recently filed a petition with the Justice Department for a commutation of John’s sentence, citing the fact that Louisiana-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was seized concurrently with John, was never charged with criminal activity. Unlike Lindh, Hamdi was held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where his U.S. citizenship was verified. In June 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that Hamdi could not be held without being charged, and he was released to his parents in Saudi Arabia.

Frank Lindh insisted that his son was unfairly the focal point of Americans’ emotions after the 9/11 tragedy. While he supported his son’s overseas studies, he said, he did not support John’s decision to go to Afghanistan. “If I had known, I would have advised John not to go,” Lindh said. “I would have told him if he wanted to do some good—go to the refugee camps.”

And, Lindh emphasized, even his son regrets his trip. In his statement to Federal Court Judge T.S. Ellis, III, at his Oct. 4, 2002 sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, young Lindh admitted, “I made a mistake by joining the Taliban. Had I realized then what I know now about the Taliban, I would never have joined them.”

Consul General Salaheldin on Egyptian-American Relations


	Consul General Abderahman Salaheldin (staff Photo P. Pasquini).

Despite having different views on certain foreign policy issues—notably the Iraq war and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land—the United States and Egypt serve as a model for cooperation between the West and the Muslim world, Consul General Abderahman Salaheldin told a San Francisco Commonwealth Club audience Jan. 17. While Egyptian troops were not part of the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq in March 2003, he said, the longtime U.S. ally has provided American naval vessels with short-notice passage and protection through the Suez Canal and the rest of its territorial waters and allows flyovers of Egyptian airspace.

The consul general went on to express his country’s appreciation of U.S. financial aid over some 30 years. “U.S. security and economic assistance to Egypt is a wonderful success story,” he noted. The aid given to his country in the mid-1970s “salvaged the Egyptian economy, which had been devastated by war and the impediments of a closed and centrally controlled system,” Salaheldin explained. Since Egypt’s economy has expanded and averages an annual five to six percent growth rate, aid is being reduced and replaced by increasing trade, he added.

The relationship, however, has not been trouble-free, the diplomat acknowledged. The slow pace of economic and political reform in Egypt has concerned not only Washington, but also Egyptians, who have hoped for a quicker change, the consul general insisted. Last September, he pointed out, Egypt held its first multiparty presidential elections, and the parliamentary elections produced a representative parliament that has about 30 percent or more of its members from the opposition, and many of them are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Egypt and the United States have worked together for the past 30 years to advance peace, development and democracy,” Salaheldin concluded, “while at the same time managing their differences.”

Tut Mystery Revisited

San Francisco’s tony Westin St. Francis Hotel was the glamorous setting for a Jan. 26 dinner hosted by Egyptian Consul General Salaheldin. Although the scheduled guest speaker, Dr. Zahi Hawass, unexpectedly had to postpone his U.S. trip, guests viewed Egypt’s top archaeologist via a large screen presentation of “King Tut’s Final Secrets.” The National Geographic Society (NGS) documentary is a fascinating account of the exhumation and cat scanning of the famous pharaoh led by Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, and an NGS consultant and explorer-in-residence. Using state-of-the-art technology, Hawass and his team of archaeologists and scientists attempt to solve the mystery of Tutankhamun’s death at age 19. And through forensic reconstruction, the film depicts a likeness of the famous teenage king.

Elaine Pasquini is a free-lance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.