“I went up to the room where his father had been painting the walls, I saw the wet paint, the toy trucks on the bed and the blood on the floor,” said Alison Weir.
She saw the wall hanging in the living room that had a bullet hole in it that said in English, “thinking of God makes our hearts grow calm.” The family had moved into their dream home 10 days before.
“I saw the flowers in the living room and the family photographs,” she said.
Weir, founder of the nonprofit organization “If Americans Knew,” spoke at Texas A&M Wednesday and recounted how she covered the death of a nine- year- old Palestinian boy as a freelance journalist in Palestine.
In a presentation, Weir highlighted the Israeli media bias and how the total Palestinian death tolls are not reported. She talked about the $6.8 million American tax dollars that are spent for Israeli forces every day.
Weir said her organization undertook research about the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the holes in Palestinian reporting.
“We asked about both [countries] and we used an Israeli organization to get the statistics so these are not in dispute. 169 Palestinians were killed by Israelis and 49 Israelis were killed by Palestinians,” Weir said. “We found that in primetime news like ABC, NBC and CBS were reporting deaths up to three or four times greater than they were reporting on Israeli deaths,” she said.
The organization looked at the subcategory of children deaths. In the reports it was found that 28 Israelis and 138 Palestinians were killed. They used the definition of 17 and below to classify as children.
“We found that they were reporting on Israeli tragedies to rates 13 or 14 times greater than they were reporting on Palestinians,” she said.
She said the regional newspapers like The San Jose Mercury News had a bias in the figures. There were 121 Israeli deaths and 384 Palestinian deaths. The figures were not only reversed on the front page of the paper but they had increased the differentials.
“Suppose The Mercury News had reported the Super Bowl backwards. [What] if they had gotten the World Series wrong? This is having to do with lives and deaths and no one noticed it, ” she said.
Weir said the tax dollars given to Israel per day will increase.
“It is going to work to about three billion dollars in a year, which works to eight million dollars per day,” Weir said.
Weir said that Americans are used to seeing images of third world poverty and are troubled by them.
“But there is so much [poverty], what do I do? This is poverty being created by the use of our money,” Weir said.
She said one of the long-term solutions could be for Americans to stop funding the cycle of violence and stop throwing away their tax dollars.
“Eye opening. Helps me understand more of what’s going on in Palestine and how we as Americans can help the situation. [I found out about] the Israeli based media and how it is affecting the Palestinians,” said Rebecca Buckalew, a freshman international studies major.
Graduate student Eric Rinard said he liked that Weir approached the situation without bias.
“The significance of the death tolls with the children and the difference in their reporting,” Rinard said.
Freshman aerospace engineering major Stephen Rieter said the information was disappointing.
“To know that so much money is going over there and a lot of people have no idea. It’s sad to see how ignorant the people here are,” Rieter said.