tonight i'll be speaking about palestine israel and the us there are many presentations about israel some about palestine but i feel that there aren't very often ones that really connect all three of those with the united including the united states this was scheduled before the latest massacre so obvious speaking about my my book but also of course be talking about the more recent developments to a degree we receive a great deal of reporting on israel palestine especially in the last two or three weeks we've been getting more than usual some aspects are covered consistently frequently and we know about them for example palestinian rockets virtually every report about gaza or about israel and about palestine and includes the statement that thousands of rockets have been fired from gaza into israel you know for months probably actually for years we've been hearing about that in almost every report it's factual we should know about it and we do a few years ago the new york times had a picture of  look very terrifying terrorists firing it but given how often they give us that information thousands of rockets have been fired from gaza they tell us very little about those rockets for example until quite recently almost all of and probably still pretty you know most of them are small homemade projectiles that's what they are and they they in most cases don't even cause any damage now they give us a statistics of sorts thousands but they never tell us well how many people have they killed in the whole approximate twelve years they've been used since spring of two thousand and one thousands of rockets in total have been fired how many people have they killed at least give us a ballpark figure well i did that a few months ago and that point it was twenty seven people now i think it's up to twenty nine people some power they just don't tell us that and they don't tell us as fair minded people we should and i think do want information about both populations so during that time how many gazans have been killed by israeli forces that number is not difficult to find either it's about five thousand seven hundred gazans in fact actually now it's six thousand i think the latest figures before the last few weeks it was four thousand seven hundred they just seem to give us some information and leave out other equally significant and relevant information so we hear about for example the israeli children that have been killed every one of those deaths is a tragedy we learn about the children we usually see their names we often hear about their parents we grieve for those children as we should but we almost never hear about the palestinian children we certainly don't learn their names we don't see their parents we don't grieve with their parents for children we don't even know were killed if you'll notice look at the first year ninety one palestinian children were killed in the round of violence that began in fall of two thousand ninety one were killed before a single israeli child and yet our media always portrayed israeli actions as retaliatory chronologically that is inaccurate i think that we should hear about all of those children and if we had if we had if we had known that ninety one children were being killed and there the number one cause of their deaths was gunfire to the head if we had known that our money was being used to shoot children in the head i like to believe and i do believe that americans would have demanded that it stop and if we had done that all of those other children might be living today if we do it now all of the children in the coming months might be living i like to tell people how i became involved i don't happen to be jewish or palestinian or muslim like most americans about fourteen years ago i was i knew very little about israel palestine i was the editor of a very small weekly newspaper in northern california writing about the city council the school district the local fishing fleet the middle east seemed distant confusing and irrelevant to my daily life and so like most americans i skimmed the headlines on this issue accepted the confusion that i found and i just moved on we're very busy as are all those people outside tonight but then in fall of two thousand when what's called the second palestinian intifada began the palestinian uprising and it was in the news a a bit i decided to pay attention to just learn what this was all about and when i finally paid attention belatedly in my life i noticed something i should have noticed long before as a journalist i noticed how one sided the coverage was that we heard from and about israelis in great detail as we should but then i expected and waited to hear about palestinian in equivalent detail that there are two parties here but i noticed that came much less frequently and so i began to look into the issue more and more i began to read reports from the region and to discover what was going on and i was shocked at what i discovered i read in the israeli military media for example one of many reports but i read a report reporting when an israeli academic had said she said that israeli forces as i already by that time had learned were killing many people unarmed demonstrators there killing them in large numbers but she said what the strategy was was to not kill too many because if you kill too many there's the chance you would trigger international outrage so the deaths were not huge but the injuries were because they were injuring large numbers those would be off the radar she wrote that they were injuring i think they had injured three six thousand in the first month and she wrote and please remember this is from an israeli newspaper that i read this she wrote that israeli forces were specifically targeting eyes and kneecaps so with that kind of information as well as learning for the first time in my life that we give israel more of our tax money than any other country on earth more than all of sub saharan africa put together that is approximately eight million dollars pre date a now it's about to go up to about ten million dollars per day i be i began to think this was the most covered up issue i had  ever seen of such profound importance and so i decided i needed to go and see for myself if what i thought i was beginning to learn was actually true and so began the most unusual trip i've ever to undertaken many years before i had been in the peace corps in afghanistan in that case i had a very official support system helping me and guiding me the peace corps in this case i was going to be traveling alone and i had no organization sponsoring or guiding me whatsoever as i landed on february seventh at eight pm two thousand and one i experienced a sudden pang of the disquiet i'd been trying to ignore on that very long airline flight what was it going to be like for me as a single female american to wander alone to a muslim largely muslim land that was in the middle of a violent uprising and that was that the epicenter we're continually told is hostile to americans in general and to women in particular what was it going to be like for me as i traveled very randomly and haphazardly i discovered these were more two myths about the syria that are as widely believed as they are false people invited me to stay in their homes which i gladly did they treated me with respect whenever i said i was an american which is what i always told them  invariable response on that trip and on my many trips since i was welcome and yet we almost never see this on that trip i just tell you a little bit about it but i found more about what was being done to palestinians remember this was this was by this time february of two thousand and one before a single rocket had before been fired about five years before hamas had been elected those are the two reasons supposedly israel's attack in gaza well this is what does it looked like these are the pictures i took here it is that was filled with families where their children were safe they had somewhere else to go but many people were still living in those homes these these are all gone now at one point when i was wandering around this area there was suddenly israeli gunfire very nearby we are ducked and they took me away to a safer area so i wrote in an e mail at the time i had first that israel thought that israeli gunfire that suddenly occurred was just a coincidence but then as i thought about it more i think that was a very naive assessment because i had occasionally looked over sandbag barricades or peeked over picked out shattered windows and i had seen israeli guard towers overlooking us and i have no doubt that those israeli soldiers noticed that a foreigner was wandering around and i suspect they decided to send her a message i don't see what we're doing don't come to palestine i saw a beautiful agricultural lands that were being destroyed next to the beautiful blue mediterranean sea i saw a stand of what had been one hundred year old date palms that were flattened i saw groves of of olive trees destroyed entire crops destroyed and i remember thinking i saw farmers who had farm there forever for generation upon generation had farm there and i thought how are they going to feed their children you know when your entire orchardist just destroyed your entire farm your in all of your crops how do you feed your children and this was many years ago before it got really bad i saw a people being destroyed with my my tax money to me that's newsworthy i think as americans sometimes where we're sort of used to seeing images of third world poverty i think we're troubled by them but we tend to think well there's so much what can i do but that's not what i was seeing i was seeing intentionally created poverty through the use of american money and i saw much more i don't like seeing suffering i don't like seeing children in pain but since even by that time thousands of children had been injured through the use of my tax money it was my job to see them and all i had to do it turned out was go to the nearest hospital and i saw children with bullets in their back often in their back because they were running away and in their stomach and in their heads i saw a brain dead twelve year old i saw children who will never walk again they won't skip they won't frolic their childhoods are finished at one point i saw a child i saw his parents and they asked if i could help them they were happy to see me as an american because they thought maybe i could help their poor son so at i asked the doctor if maybe i could do something maybe a surgical team could be flown in from the  us or maybe their son could be flown back to the united states sometimes that's possible and the doctor explained to me that he hadn't yet had the right found the right time and the right way to tell the parents but that their son was totally eternally paralyzed so i knew something they didn't know and i wished that i didn't and now you do too that's what i saw in gaza and then i went to the west bank to a newspaper office and when i first arrived there they said a nine year old boy was just shot maybe maybe you'd like to go see and i thought no i wouldn't like to go see but i did i was there for all of us and i took pictures i saw where he had been sitting watching watching his father paint the walls i saw the wet paint the toy trucks the blood on the floor i saw the wall hanging that had a bullet hole in it and i was told that that says thinking of god makes our hearts grow calm i saw the needlepoint over the front door that i could read myself it said god bless our home the family had moved in ten days before to their dream house i saw the flowers in the living room in the family photos on the wall and i saw the parents when they got back from the hospital i heard the mother and the sisters weeping and weeping and i saw the father walking around shellshocked it looked like he was sleepwalking in a bad dream that will never end and i saw the the neighbors come in to try to comfort them at one point i heard a man t father when it looked like he was about to break down your son is a bird in heaven now the next day was the funeral and the next day there was another they were funerals pretty much every day and for the  second one was for a woman who had had three sons eighteen fourteen and twelve and she had been killed so as i was interviewing people i suddenly found myself next to a woman who it turned out was the dead woman's neighbor this woman had gone to college in the us she told me about her friend she said that just a few days before her friend had been asking her what it was like to go to college in the u s because her eighteen year old son wanted to go to college in the u s this woman explained to me she said it's every boy's dream in palestine to go to college in the u s but she said of course he won't go now he'll stay home to help with his brothers and since that trip i've been back other times and seen the wall confiscating more land in the kafka esque way that people get out of bethlehem if they can get out of bethlehem and this is these are my pictures from the last time i visited gaza and around twenty ten and when i came back from that first trip i started an organization called if americans knew because i believed and i still believe if we all knew what was going on we would stop funding it and we would end the violence we especially looked at the media because the media i feel news organizations this is the most powerful institution in a democracy this is how everybody around us learns what they think they know about many issues especially international issues so we  decided to conduct media studies i like the idea of a statistical study where you choose a category of significance something as that is as a munis subjective bias as possible we decided to study how the media covered deaths among both populations both is the keyword we rarely get that and we especially decide to look at the first year of that current uprising because first impressions are so powerful and we did a subcategory of how many children were killed and how those were covered because i believe pretty much all of us feel that it is horrible and tragic when a child is killed we're deeply saddened it's also extremely newsworthy so we need to ask to answer a very sad question how many children among both populations were killed in that first year using an israeli source we discovered twenty eight israeli children had been killed and one hundred thirty one palestinian children how is this covered by our primetime network news shows c b s a b c n b c well we found that they had covered israeli children's deaths at rates up to thirteen and fourteen times greater than they reported on the palestinian children's deaths in fact typically the the media have a pattern of reporting on palestinian children deaths so minimally even though they are so large that many people have no idea they've been occurring another duke group did a study of national public radio n p r has been accused consistently by israel partisans as being supposedly pro palestinian they have caused a substantial financial damage to some n p r affiliates around the country with that accusation so fairness and accuracy  reporting decided to look into those accusations and to study n p r s reporting their researcher seth ackerman didn't excellent study and he discovered that yes indeed n p r is very distorted on this issue but that once again it isn't a pro israel direction he gave his study what i feel is a brilliant title he called it the illusion of balance because n p r he counted up had covered almost the same number of israeli children's deaths as palestinian children's deaths making it seem to many listeners this was a reliable unbiased source of information balanced information and reality that was not balanced that was huge distortion in fact i would suggest it was manipulation in which you report a very large proportion almost all of one persons one populations deaths and very few of the others we've also looked at daily newspapers just this is just a very typical daily newspaper from silicon valley near stanford university's san jose mercury news in this case we looked at front page headlines many people are so busy that might be all you look at for that day but at least you're keeping up with the important news of the day the big front page news of the day and again to study those we need to baseline how many people of both population were killed and we discovered that as always it and every period of time it's far more palestinians that had been killed during that period one hundred twenty one israelis at least three hundred eighty four palestinians how is this covered by by the daily newspapers daily reap front page headlines they had reversed it and increased the differential so while this is what was actually going on that's what it looked like i was astounded this was one of our first studies and it occurred to me what if the mercury news had covered the superbowl backwards what if they'd gotten the world series wrong there would have been jokes about them by late night comedians around the country and yet here they were committing a distortion of that magnitude having to do with lives and deaths and no one noticed it and i would suggest that the newspapers here did the same thing often throughout the past twelve or thirteen years i have seen this phrase as perhaps many of you have noticed that whenever is almost any time israelis suffer something are killed or there's an attack a successful attack on israel it's portrayed as a period of calm has just been shattered by palestinian violence there was a headline of that sort in two thousand and five in the los angeles times i was living in l a at that time and i saw this headline and this news story on their website before in early evening long before the newspaper had gone to press so i tried to call the foreign desk with a correction so that they wouldn't publish something that was wrong and i told them that during what they were calling a period of calm one hundred seventy palestinian men women and children had been killed and that during a period they said was caught three hundred seventy nine palestinian men women and children had been injured their response was we said relative c and they hung up the phone and they didn't change a single word in their new story or add a single piece of this information there are so many omissions that i could go on all night with these but i do just one more this is a very different one this one is about the u s this one is about something that took place on capitol hill in two thousand and three there was a briefing in the rayburn house office building the chairman of that briefing was a four star admiral admiral thomas moore he had been chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of world war two hero the highest ranking military officer can attain really and the former chairman of the join chiefs of staff also part of the panel was a rear admiral mullen starring who had been in charge of the whole legal department of the u s navy also part of their commission was a marine general and not just any marine general this one was the highest ranking medal of honor recipient in the united states the highest medal of valor an american ken when they announced their findings on capitol hill that israel had tried to set a sink a u s navy ship that they had killed thirty four americans and injured over one hundred seventy of them the decks had been running with blood that rescue flights to these men had been recalled by order of the secretary of defense and the president of the united states that this incident in fact had been ordered covered up by the president of the united states and that this attack by israel constituted an act of war against the united states by israel statements of that gravity by officials of that high rank on capitol hill in a house office building are newsworthy and yet there is nothing about them in the washington post the new york times allegedly patriotic network fox news we may wish to call why they didn't cover it the only place that covered those statements was the stars and stripes newspaper that's the military newspaper abroad and it's in detail in the congressional record there you can read every word now let's talk about the the recent situation i'm not up with the most recent since i've been out of touch for a few hours but let's look at what has gone on in the recent conflicts beginning i'd say over over about the last five or six years in two thousand and nine to ten there was a similar bombardment of gaza in which at least fourteen hundred palestinians were killed a large majority of them civilians in fact over half i believe are women and children and nine israelis were killed then in two thousand and twelve we had a much smaller massacre in which this number actually was turned out to be larger because a number of people died later from their injuries but it was at least one hundred sixty nine palestinians of whom quite a few were children compared to six israelis and now we come to two thousand and fourteen in which the media date the progression that has led to a current massacre they usually started from about i believe  june twelfth when three young israelis were abducted and tragically murdered that's where they usually started from well let's let's be a little more honest and started form a more reasonable starting  start with january first and look at the deaths among both populations again because all matter and you will see the israeli deaths on the left and the palestinian deaths on the right so here is january the pink as a child no israeli deaths next we will look at february knows really deaths next we will look at may achieve the greenman is a child next we will look at april we do have one israeli soldier and next we have made three more palestinians two of them children none of this was newsworthy to our media none of those children none of that was or newsworthy and what about abductions they were very concerned about three israelis abducted well during this time january first through may thirty first israeli forces had abducted two thousand three hundred palestinians quite a few children among them but that wasn't newsworthy