This House would stop US Aid to Israel

My thanks to the Commonwealth Club and the organizers of Tuesday night's debate for hosting this valuable discussion on US military aid to Israel-Palestine.

I apologize for exceeding my time limit during my opening statement -- I had timed it several times and felt certain, apparently incorrectly, that it would fit within the time frame. In terms of the whole evening, however, I believe I took less time than my opponents, who also exceeded their time limits on several occasions, so I believe the timing worked out within reasonable and fair parameters.

The only unfortunate part of the event, in my opinion, was the descent into a startlingly personal attack by the final audience member. I was surprised that this was allowed, and even more surprised that I was not allowed to respond.

In my view, personal attacks – from any side – should always be discouraged; otherwise, a discussion of content can quickly descend into ad hominem nastiness that leads nowhere.

However, if it is felt that all expressions of any sort should be allowed – which is a defensible perspective -- then certainly this decision requires that the subject of an attack always be allowed to respond. To me, this should go without saying.

However, I can understand how the moderator, under considerable time pressure and doing his best in a very tense situation, overlooked all this in his need to bring the event to a timely close. I am grateful that I am now being given the chance to respond.

The fact is that it is not rare for advocates of a particular stance to resort to name-calling when the facts don't support their views. My opening statement (with a few additional sentences) has just been published by CounterPunch and is posted on our own website as well: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/weir-aid.html I urge people to look into these facts to decide for themselves their veracity.

Unfortunately, I expect that the audience member who attacked me is one of many victims of what Prof. Norman Finkelstein terms "The Holocaust Industry" (see his excellent book by this name). It is extremely difficult for such people to imagine the self-identified Jewish state as anything other than a victim, and when confronted by information that counters this mythical but deeply ingrained image, they charge that the messenger of such facts is "preaching hatred" or is "anti-Semitic."

The reality is that there have been many horrific holocausts throughout history, not just one, and that Jewish human beings are no better and no worse than any others. The words of Israeli author Israel Shahak are informative: "In the last 40 years [now 60 years] the number of non-Jews killed by Jews is by far greater than the number of the Jews killed by non-Jews. The extent of the persecution and discrimination against non-Jews inflicted by the 'Jewish state' with the support of organized diaspora Jews is also enormously greater than the suffering inflicted on Jews by regimes hostile to them."
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html

I suspect that if we were living in 1941 and I had just returned from Germany, some audience members would have called my descriptions "hatred" and "anti-German." Yet, I hope I would have continued in my efforts – as did journalist Dorothy Thompson, who wrote forcefully against Hitler and was the first foreign correspondent to be expelled from Germany. Thompson's career is instructive.

After the war, she visited Palestine and began to describe the situation there, both in print and film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ6lIsl-pHU Before long, her columns – which had run in hundreds of newspapers – were canceled and her name slowly erased from history, despite the fact that she had been nationally renowned, played by Katharine Hepburn in a major Hollywood film and by Lauren Bacall on Broadway, and "one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century" according to the Britannica. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/dthompson.html
It is censorship such as this that has led so many of us to be misinformed on Israel-Palestine.

It is time for the personal name-calling to stop, and the search for real information to begin. It is my opinion that Americans have the power to bring peace in the Middle East and to end the continual tragic cycle of killing – but only when we are fully and accurately informed.

In my view,it was inappropriate to have presented this speaker in the debate and to give her more exposure in this forum.

Surely, a speaker who used less hateful rhetoric could have been found for the debate, especially since it was held at the Commonwealth Club.

Looking from a neutral third world point of view I could not see a single instance of so called hate in the text above from Alison.

I haven't been to the debates yet but such instances of name calling and censorship seem to be diametric to the purpose of the debate group.