American Herald Tribune - In a livestream of a lecture at the Malcolm X Library of San Diego, former journalist Alison Weir, now head of the non-profit educational group If Americans Knew which seeks to educate Americans on how their tax dollars are spent to violate human rights abroad, discussed the hidden history of how America was used to create the "State" of Israel.


After a detailed, highly-cited, and historical background on the Zionist lobby’s influence on the United States since the early 1900s, she went on to discuss how the current conflicts in the Middle East also date back to the early 1900s. Theodor Herzl was the first person to coin the “Greater Israel” concept, meaning that the borders of a future Zionist state would be beyond the bounds of historic Palestine, but would go from the Nile River to the Euphrates.


This was later codified in the 1980s Oded Yinon strategy, which involved stoking ethnic and sectarian division in order to destabilize and break up neighboring Arab states into smaller, weaker states that fight each other instead of uniting to resist the Zionist entity. In short, the Zionist advisers wrote in their plan that all civil strife in the Arab-Islamic world, whether it be sectarian (Sunni, Shi’a) or ethnic (Arab, Kurd, Turk, Levant, Khaleej, Mesopotamia), is all to the benefit of Israel.


A small amount of research, whether public statements by the Zionist regime or leaked cables obtained via Wikileaks or Freedom of Information Act, shows that Israel supported ethnic and sectarian division in Iraq and Syria.


This plan was reiterated in Richard Perle’s Clean Break white paper from the mid-90s as well as the Project for the New American Century’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” white paper from the year 2000.


Alison Weir is an American writer and an activist for the Palestinian cause. She is the founder and director of the non-profit organization If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. In 2001, Alison Weir left her job as editor of a weekly newspaper and traveled alone to the Palestinian territoriesduring the Second Intifada. She visited the West Bank and Gaza and witnessed the scenes of violence, seeing the truth of the conflict on the ground, and from where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. She was amazed by what she learned: That the truth of the conflict, on the ground, bore almost no resemblance to the stories told in US media. She return in US determined to change that. She began to speak and write on the topic and founded If Americans Knew, a nonprofit dedicated to accurately informing Americans. More recently, she also accepted a position as president of the Council for the National Interest.

Alison Weir was a civil rights activist and Peace Corps volunteer. Alison Weir has spoken all over the United States, including two briefings on Capitol Hill, presentations at the National Press Club in Washington DC (broadcast nationally on C-Span), Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine (one also broadcast on C-Span), at World Affairs Councils, and at numerous universities including Harvard Law School, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Georgetown, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Vassar, the Naval Postgraduate Institute, Purdue, Northwestern, and the University of Virginia. She has given papers at various international conferences, lectured in Ramallah and at the University of Qatar, presented at the Asia Media Summits in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and given speaking tours in England, Wales, Iran and Qatar.

Alison Weir has alsowrittenwidely on Israel-Palestine, the US connection, and media coverage. Her first book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, was published in February 2014 and has received high praise. Her essays and articles have appeared in a number of books and magazines, among them The New Intifada (Verso), Censored 2005 (Seven Stories Press), Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Rienner), The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, San Francisco Bay View newspaper, CounterPunch, and The Link.

Alison Weir has received various awards and in 2004 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.”