tonight i'll be speaking about palestine israel and the us 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 rocket  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 how 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 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 seemed 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 th 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 they're 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 undertak 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  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 the 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 wondering 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 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 head farm there and i thought how are they going to feed their children you know when your entire orchardist just destroyed your entire farm you're 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 news money 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 follow their childhoods are finished at one point i saw  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 and 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 and 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 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 told the 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 had turned out was the dead woman's neighbor this woman had gone to college in the u s 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 want 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 and 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 key word we rarely get that and we especially decided 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 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 well we found that they had covered israeli children 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 do group did a study of national public 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 in reporting decided to look into those accusations and to study n p r s reporting the researchers said ackerman didn't excellent study and he discovered that yes indeed r is very distorted on this issue but that once again it is in 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 of 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 we discovered that as always it in 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 super bowl 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 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 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 calm three hundred seventy nine palestinian men women and children had been injured their response was we said relative calm 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 many omissions that i could go on all night with these but i'll do just one more this is a very different one this one is about the us 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 for world war two hero the highest  military officer can attain really and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff also part of the panel was a rear admiral merlin 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 can win then ounce 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 diligently 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 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 or over about the last five or six years in two thousand 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 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 point let's 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 is a child no israeli deaths next we will look at february no israeli deaths next we will look at may achieve the green one as 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 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 now we look at you and there we see those three and then we look  up then we have the chart this one that i have here up through july twenty first i think it was and those are the numbers this is what we're not getting we get such filtered coverage with so many omissions when i began to look into this and wake up to this late in my life i wondered much more how did the song begin what's going on how what's what's israel palestine about who really didn't initiate the violence you know we've seen from january first we've seen going back to the january going back to two thousand two thousand and one where where and how did the sauce start and how did the u s get such a uniquely special relationship with a tiny country without resources how did this happen well one of the first things i learned was that when when i was born there was no israel so where did this come from well what i discovered was that there was a movement that began over a century ago and began operating in europe and in the united states it was a was and i political movement that has profoundly and negatively impacted our country it has tragically impacted the middle east and it has dangerously impacted the entire world and yet most of us i think have never heard of it and could certainly not define it it's political zionism this was a movement to create a jewish state in palestine it began in the late eighteenth hundred to let us look at palestine in the late one thousand nine hundred it was what we largely think of now as a somewhat multicultural land in that was about eighty percent muslim about fifteen percent christian and about five percent jewish all living together quite successfully there are mosques synagogues churches throughout palestine throughout the middle east and throughout north africa these populations had been living without conflict for centuries but with this movement was was created largely in israel largely in europe and then take at the same time in the us to create a jewish state on land that was already inhabited in which ninety five percent were not jewish therefore this would involve and this was known by the leadership even though many followers didn't know it this would mean that ninety five percent of those people were going to be dispossessed by money if possible by force if necessary this was written in sinus journals early on now in my book and my talk concentrates on the us aspect of all of this what surprised me in my research is how early and how active this movement was in the united states a movement had never heard of although i was born here my parents were born here and some ancestors go back to the beginning it turns out that this was a very significant movement long before my parents were born twelve we had a very significant development a prominent lawyer named louis brandeis became a zionist brandeis not only just be it didn't just become a zionist within about two years he then became the head of world zionism this was a pub this was public it's not some secret knowledge it's just that most of us don't know it and then within a few years he was also a supreme court justice named by woodrow wilson when you're a supreme court justice you're supposed to resign your various board memberships and affiliations because you're supposed to not have any conflict of interest but be neutral so he did resign his leadership of world zionism but in reality he continued it he would receive reports in his supreme court chambers by his loyal lieutenants and then he would give them directives to go out and to follow in work for zionism and this is mentioned in a number of very reliable books if you get my book you'll see that my book is over half foot notes it's all cited by the way one of his loyal lieutenants also went on to become a very prominent supreme court justice felix frankfurter so i had read that that to me was shocking right there but then i discovered something more saw give you my citations for this next information so you can evaluate whether you find it reliable or not the way i did my research is i would read books then i would look at their footnotes to see where they had gotten that information then i would often get those books and read those footnotes and then order those books and read those footnotes and on and on so one of the books that i read was really a fairly well known one israel in the mind of america published by a very mainstream establish and the author was a very mainstream othar he had been diplomatic correspondent for the new york times he had been at harvard he had written a number of well regarded various stablish mmon nonfiction books well in this book he had a few pages in which he told about a secret zionist society that had operated in the united states of which louis brandeis while a supreme court justice had been a leader so i looked at where he got that information and i went to that source it turned out to be from a scholarly journal called the american jewish historical quarterly a very respected journal so then i looked at the author well where is this a reliable author who wrote this very to me explosive information and turned out to be a well regarded israeli historian at a mainstream  israeli university she had written an article in one nine hundred seventy five called the parish a secret episode in american zionist history and she told about what this was an elitist secret society the word meant fair or seize and separate they would go around the country and influence people to push the scientist agenda by the way at this time the jewish population were not because i missed that all the large majority were not scientists many were opposed to zionism this was a very very fringe element to a certain regard then in the secret society they even had a secret induction ceremony so that when somebody joined the society in many their membership included professors and harvard you know recent harvard graduates and doctors significant people around the country were sometimes members and in these initiation ceremony they were told by the inductor or and they swore to this until our purpose shall be accomplished you will be the fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life dear than that a family of school of nation as early as november nine hundred fifteen a leader of the parish went around suggesting that the british might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a jewish national homeland in palestine those of you who have heard of the balfour declaration that came in one nine hundred seventeen might find this relevant i'll get into that little bit more let's remember what was going on during this time period now in the world especially that involve britain well of course hundred fourteen began what was called at that time the great war of massive carnage british forces in the first day of the battle of the some lost cording to a story and somewhere around fifty thousand to sixty thousand men in one day of a battle that went on and on and on the british and the german both sides of course wanted the u s to come in on their side to join this carnage but the american population were that bad thing they were isolationists they didn't want to go kill and be killed in a foreign pointless war in fact woodrow wilson was elected with the slogan he kept us out of the war but of course as you know with hindsight no he didn't well what happened is that this is the zionists leaders some of them in britain a man named time weitzman who is quite well known went to the british government and said well we can help you win this war now why would they want to do that because the war wasn't just against germany it was against the ottoman empire the ottoman empire  held palestine palestine was at and under the ottoman empire so by defeating them the british would would come into control of of palestine so the zionists went to the british and said we can help you get the united states into the war are our zionist colleagues in the united states for example they said in writing louis brandeis who is close to president wilson can help to do that in exchange for that the british did issue a declaration that was quite significant mild as it may sound it was really considered a gentlemen's agreement this is written about in a number of books just most of us don't know this about our own history so the balfour declaration was basically a promise that the british would help to facilitate the scientist objective of creating a jewish state in palestine after the british of course did when then at the paris peace talks the zionist push to push this wording into the mandate in which britain took charge of palestine then jumping ahead to some of the american aspects again then we find during the thirty's and the forty's in palestine itself there were some the violence increased naturally as soon as you know when there was colonization beginning around the turn of the century to a land with the intention of pushing out the land the indigenous population at some point is going to wake out wake up and there will be violence that it happened in the early twenty's and again one thousand nine hundred twenty nine there was violence between the two populations then then as now the large number of those killed were the palestinians so as the violence increased there were some terrorist organizations created in palestine by the zionists one of them led by former in fact two of them led by future israeli prime ministers and those those terrorist organizations in palestine they're going in the stern gang it turns out had front groups in the united states with duplicitous names and they were funneling massive amounts of money and weaponry to these terror groups in palestine they put on major pageants where supreme court justices attended and thousands of people attended they were very prominent one of them was led by a man named peter people thought his real name was hill cook he was the operative for the year going i looked into one of the leaders a bit more just just because i need to find out his first name when you're writing a book you can't just write someone's last name you need to know their first name and i had heard about another leader of of one of these types of front groups connected to killing in palestine and his name was rabbi course but i didn't know the first name none of the books that i had had a few paragraphs of them but none of them gave his first name so i looked into it on the internet tried to do various searches and eventually i came up with a un report that gave his for his first name and told a little bit about a plot he was part of using those search terms i then could you know put in more information in the my search bar and suddenly all these fly an airplane and bomb britain after the war britain that it just defeated hitler but they were so angry at the british because the british were not allowing a large enough jewish immigration into palestine so they were going to kill the british so kirk and his section of the stern gang had this plan but there was one problem they they didn't know how to fly an airplane they weren't pilots so they need to find somebody and they recruited a young american aviator named reginald gilbert i discovered reginald gilbert had been an ace during the war he was in paris and they recruited him to fly the airplane for them he pretended to go along with the plot but then he went to the american embassy and the american embassy in inform the paris police in scotland yard so for a week he pretended to go along with this cell and then when it came time to actually take off to fly the plane to drop these incendiary bombs onto the foreign ministry they were caught by the way their original plan had been to bomb parliament but then they decided they had the foreign ministry more and gilbert at one point had said to them well what if i can't find the foreign ministry in the london fog they didn't have the degree of instrument mentation we have today and that was a real possibility and they said then just drop them anywhere kill anybody all of our british are our enemy so they were caught course was in prison for a few months in paris and he eventually got off he had very powerful friends in the united states but i was curious about him i looked into him some more did you know this was so astounding to me in one of these you know dozens and dozens of books i have none of them had and had the story in there at all and so in looking at him i discovered that later in life he was a friend of richard nixon in fact it was reported that he had helped to influence nixon's policies on the middle east in fact nixon sort of in a fond way called him my rabbi now the precursor today's very powerful israel lobby was a group called the american zionist emergency council this was formed in around  forty and by one nine hundred forty three had a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread within a few years they had maneuvered their way into access to an even far larger sum in which they had access to fourteen million dollars in one nine hundred forty one and one hundred fifty million dollars by nine hundred forty eight that's the equivalent in today's dollars of a trillion dollars to use to manipulate the united states so they targeted with that money every sector of u s society and you know this is an ancient history they had annual reports they had directives you know office it was written down on paper they targeted congressman christian clergy editors professors business and labor jewish were veterans they published books all over they had four hundred local committees there were massive campaigns throughout the country they also worked especially to manufacture christian support they say secretly funded sort of christian groups that would push the same zionist ideology they are funded books that became huge bestsellers it was and i'm enormously successful campaign throughout the country even though during this time there was a great deal of opposition to zionism by many different groups by christian leaders by state department pentagon intelligence agencies jewish antis zionists many people were opposed to a two of the most celebrated christian pastors opposed it on religious and moral grounds the christian leaders in the middle east had gone to paris peace talks to advocate on behalf of the arab population that there should be self determination of peoples there one very prominent american christian who was a dead sea scholar wrote a wonderful book called palestine is our issue is our business and you know to read that book you it's very strong it talks about the right of return about palestinian resistance fighters etc but it was buried diplomats the state department the military the pentagon the intelligence agencies wrote directive that after directive study after study memo after memo talking about how damaging to the u  s and to u s strategic interests and how in violation of american principles zionism would be starting from under taft there was then a commission to that to palestine during the time of the paris peace talks they went there to investigate the situation to you know look into the possibility of creating a jewish state there and they came back with a very powerful report saying this would be a grave trespass on the rights of the people there this was entirely buried and had no effect whatsoever dean acheson a major statesman for many years wrote that the zionist agenda would imperil not only american but all western interests in the near east the cia wrote that there are pursuing objectives that would endanger the strategic interests of the western powers in the near and middle east there's so much evidence of this you know some people debate about whether the lobby is powerful it's been powerful since the beginning and the evidence is all there it's just buried alfred lin thought i was part of the american council for judaism i had the honor of meeting him he wrote excellent books about this that group was was arguing against zionism and part of what they were arguing in the state department was that there'd be massive bloodshed and chaos if this was pushed through when the zionist began to work to push through what's called the partition plan through the united nations that's portrayed to americans as this wonderful compromise palestinians just you know ignored this wonderful opportunity that palestinians pushed through  they knew in the state department were saying this would be a disaster if this gets pushed through the idea was that the that palestine half of it would be given to a jewish state even though these remote mostly recently arrived and heard had originally only been five of the of the pop five percent of the population and even after decades of emigration were thirty percent of the population and this plan wasn't actually half the plan was that they would get fifty five percent of palestine approximately and the palestinians would get about forty five percent of their own land now i know what the americans would say if the u n did that to us but this is portrayed with those foolish palestinians not accepting it and by the way the many people are under the illusion that israel bought up all that land that's what's been told and that was the attempt and they did increase jewish ownership about over you know from what was originally about one percent because it was so an urban population to at most eight percent most historians said they owned about five to six percent so the group that owned eight percent under this plan was getting fifty five percent a good deal for them no wonder they said they would go along with it and secretly in their journal said it's the first step then we will get it all but rather than bringing peace which was what the u n was charged with instead of bringing peace it did the opposite it created of course still more violence and there was a war that israel calls its war of independence and palestinians call it  catastrophe because it was a massive humanitarian catastrophe at least three quarters of a million men women and children were very ruthlessly and violently pushed off their land there were at least sixteen massacres before a single arab army finally joined the fray and by the way those of you that grew up there with the myth that i did that little israel declared its independence and suddenly you know five to seven arab armies suddenly just attacked but israel somehow won because god you know was on their side or something well in reality before israel declared its independence on about may fourteenth fifteenth that night type of situation they had already committed sixteen massacres these are quite grisly you can read the details of them they had already ethnically cleansed at least two hundred thousand people when these arab armies did come into the fray they were smaller in number including the palestinian forces than the zionist forces were and by the way all of virtually all of the battles were actually fought on the part that according to the u n plan was going to be palestinian territory now some people again were trying to tell americans what was going on one of the most important was a woman named dorothy thompson she was what britannica encyclopedia says was one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century in fact i believe at one place they say that she is the most important female journalist of the twentieth century it's true although i had never heard of her she had a newspaper column that was printed all over the united states a radio program that was listening to by millions of americans she was such a celebrity that there was a broadway play in which she was loose she was played by lauren bacall and there was a hollywood movie loosely based on her life in which she was p by katharine hepburn she was considered the most powerful woman in the united states after eleanor roosevelt she was an excellent journalist she had been a foreign correspondent in germany during the thirty's and had been one of the first journalist to raise the alarm about hitler she was the first foreign journalist to be expelled by hitler she was therefore are very sympathetic to zionism but after the war when israel when you know later when israel began to be created she went over to see this wonderful state of israel the new jewish state and when she got there she saw hundreds of thousands of palestinian refugees living in squalor dying in large numbers every day and she began to write of them to tell about them to speak about them she even eventually made a documentary about them and for telling about these people for writing about these people she lost her newspaper column she lost her radio program she lost her fame and she was erased from history and sort of a similar final note if i now try to write an article maybe about dorothy thompson fascinating person or maybe about the parish or maybe about reginald gilbert there's much more i could tell you about very interesting about him if i tried to do that for a popular american history magazine which i would like to do i quite likely would not get it published and that's you know this is not paranoids speculation a few years ago we tried to put a paid newspaper ad in american history magazine not about palestine we tried to put a paid ad in about a book a memoir by a ninety one year old american congressman tell us about his his childhood and depression era america  about being a small town newspaper editor about serving the seabees during world war two about going to congress about his various fights in congress and about also near the end of the book it tells about the fact that when he started to speak about palestine he was targeted by the israel lobby money was funded to his opponent and after twenty two years in congress he lost the election but our advertisement didn't even tell about that law last part of his very long life it just told about his book you know the usual blurbs about what a wonderful book this is but the publisher and owner of american history magazine informed us that they would not publish our advertisement in american history magazine because we were anti israel and that they would not publish our advertisement in any of the popular history magazines that they own in the united states which is virtually everyone this is according to their website the largest history chain in the world and it's certainly the largest one in the united states so what do we do about this to me we tell people what's going on we even talk to those people that we don't want to raise something serious or uncomfortable with because right now as we talking we all know what's going on in gaza in general we don't know which child was just killed or lost their parents we don't know which home was just a story which hospital was further destroyed but we know what's going on right now and now we we know a little bit about what's going on here but we have the power to change this i feel strongly that if every single person in the united states right now that is concerned about gaza would actually just do something like maybe again or maybe for the first time phone your senator if every single one of us did that tomorrow it wouldn't change the policy overnight but they would have they have their fingers to the wind and suddenly they would realize wall looks like the tide is changing here and half of them would love it to change they don't like being a pack puppets now some of them are idiot logical zionists you know that that's the reality but according to a congressman that i talked to a number few years ago he said over half in congress know what they are doing is wrong but the israel lot their fate of the israel lobby in other cases congress people have privately told individuals you need to make me do this you need to create the grassroots movement so that i can do it if everyone in america did that it would be given the impact that would bring change thank you very much