This coming week, our country's executive branch will be pushing for acceptance of a new nuclear non-proliferation initiative that refuses to accept the reality that one of the major players in the dynamics of nuclear proliferation is even a player in the discussion. This coming week, our President's United Nations and State Department representatives will continue to push a meme that the recent UN Goldstone Report on last winter's Gaza Strip War is hopelessly flawed, and should be discounted because it equally condemns both sides in the tragic and unnecessary conflict.
This coming week, one of our country's most articulate critics of Israeli and American policies toward relentlessly shrinking Palestine and of our country's relationship with the expansionist Israeli state, will deliver three addresses in Anchorage:
• On Thursday October 8th, Alison Weir will address the Bartlett Club (Denny's on DeBarr) at noon.
• On Friday October 9th, she will address the Alaska World Affairs Council (Hilton Hotel) at noon, and will speak at the Wilda Marston Theater at the Loussac Library at 7:00 p.m.
Already, the local pro-Zionist expansion network is aiming to have her appearances canceled. Beginning Friday, I started receiving calls from friends who had been contacted with the claim that Weir is a "Holocaust Denier."
I've been aware of Weir's work at If Americans Knew, and her articles at Counterpunch and other web sites for years, and had read of this false accusation before. Saturday evening, Weir was on Shannyn Moore's KBYR radio call-in program. I called and asked Weir to address the accusation. She strongly iterated that the accusation is absurd, explaining her personal knowledge of just how awful the Nazi Third Reich's liquidation of six million European Jews, along with millions of other innocents was.
Weir is in Alaska to inform our under-informed populace about the importance of getting unbiased information about the history of the Israeli state and its relationship to its neighbors and to our foreign policy decisions.
My experience with her articles and talks available on YouTube is that she is very accurate. The attacks on her here, as at other places, are designed to take advantage of the lack of information most Americans have to balanced views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and upon guilt many Americans feel through decades of exposure to heavily propagandized media coverage of events involving the Israeli state, in combination with relentless reminders of the Holocaust.
Last summer, Weir was on Eddie Burke's KBYR call-in program. Burke treated her with far less professionalism than did Shannyn Moore this Saturday.
The subject of the bombing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War came up. Burke, a U.S. Navy veteran, was totally ill-informed.
Burke claims he likes me. But when I've tried to bring up the USS Liberty with him, he immediately tries to change the subject. I believe, like every surviving member of the ship's crew, that the Israelis intended to sink the ship, while knowing it was American. Why they wanted to do that is still a mystery.
But I refuse to overrule the gut instincts of over 100 American sailors and officers who saw their shipmates killed or maimed over the course of hours; saw one American flag after another raised up the mast, and then shot down; saw torpedo boats come close enough to pepper all the lifeboats with hundreds of holes; and saw anyone willing to man a machine gun blasted to Hell.
Every surviving American from that attack - for which the commanding officer quietly received the Congressional Medal of Honor - believes the attack was intentional. A foreign government says it wasn't. If one sides with our brave sailors against that foreign government, one is immediately labeled an anti-Semite.
Why?
Any reader who wants to so label me for writing this - go find a living member of the USS Liberty crew who sides with that foreign government's version of the attack, and I'll reconsider my view.
Until then, Eddie - you're betraying your shipmates.