Alison Weir, head of If Americans Knew, is an effective critic of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her Feb. 24 letter to the New York Times points to "evidence that in the most recent uprising (beginning on Sept. 29, 2000), Israeli forces killed 86 Palestinian children before a single Israeli child had been killed and before a single suicide bombing in Israel.

In our two-year study — from Sept. 29, 2000, to Sept. 28, 2001, and in 2004 — of The Times’s coverage of Israel and Palestine, we discovered that the newspaper had covered Israeli children’s deaths at a rate seven times greater than it reported on Palestinian children’s deaths."

Her letter refers to a Times article on a talk she gave to the Greenwich (CT) library. This talk was originally cancelled because of pressure from pro-Israel critics. In a comment on the circumstances surrounding her talk, Weir notes that her talk "generated controversy among those who don't want facts about Israel to reach the general public, and so it appeared that the library was going to cancel my talks, claiming that they 'offended public sensitivities,' (which, as I'm sure you know, they certainly don't!)

However, there was an outcry against such censorship — reported by local newspapers, radio, and television (in fact, this was covered as far away as New York and Boston), and the talks went on — in a far larger venue than originally proposed. Moreover, they were attended by at least 600 people, and were extremely well received — and were covered by local television stations, newspapers, etc.

The New York Times ended up writing about this in the front section of the Sunday paper, and even the writer, who slants toward Israel, reported:

'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.' [more]