The producers of Project Censored say they “screen several thousand stories each year. About 700 of these are selected for evaluation by faculty and community evaluators. Our 89 faculty/community evaluators are experts in their individual fields and they rate the stories for credibility and national importance” The 700 stories are narrowed down to 200, then 125, 60, and finally the top 25.
Even granting for the sake of argument that Israel is “undercovered,” and that what happened there from the 1940’s onward was a major “story of 2004,” the choice of someone like Weir to cover the story is stunning and revealing. This is a “journalist” who has declared, in dramatic contradiction of reality, that “Israel has a record of attacking its neighbors – mounting massive invasions of surrounding territory in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1982” She has alleged that a secret “Zionist-Nazi” alliance conspired during World War II to settle Jews in Palestine.
Borrowing from a famous quotation about the Holocaust, Weir depicts the Israelis as Nazis who plan to round up and exterminate the Palestinians and then conquer and annihilate others: “It is time to stop saying, ‘They came for the Palestiniansand I did nothing. It is time to begin acting in a way that will allow us to say, ‘They came for the Palestiniansand I stopped them.’ ” She claims that Israel controls what appears in the U.S. media. And she has “described Palestinian terrorism as a ‘legitimate right andmoral duty’ and even referred to the founding of Israel as the start of a ‘holocaust,'” according to a report by Gilead Ini for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
In her Censored 2005 article Weir graciously notes, “I hope future editions of Project Censored will include work by some of the other superb writers and reporters on this topic today,” and proceeds to recommend the work of extremists including columnist Charley Reese, who likens Israel to Nazi Germany, and author Norman Finkelstein, whose book attacking Holocaust survivors has been described by The New York Times as “a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Weir’s article also recommends the journalism of Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn, who, as Haifa University Professor (and frequent Jewish Press contributor) Steven Plaut has reported, “openly gave credence to reports that Jews spread anthrax in the U.S. and that Israel was part of a conspiracy to topple the World Trade Center. Cockburn insists Jews conspire to control the media.”
(Not surprisingly, shortly after a 2003 Iranian military parade displayed medium-range ballistic missiles bearing banners that said “Death to Israel” and “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth,” Cockburn’s publication ran an article entitled “The Case for a Nuclear Iran.”)
The Weir article was a predictable continuation of deeply dishonest propaganda from the previous year, when Censored 2004 featured a story entitled “U.S. Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine” which claimed Israel was limiting Palestinian freedom of movement and building a monstrous “Apartheid Wall” for no apparent reason other than inherent Israeli “brutality” and a desire “to imprison Palestinians.”
The article repeatedly uses the word “nonviolent” to characterize Palestinian behavior, even though since September 2000 there have been more than 26,000 Palestinian terrorist attacks, killing over 1,000 people and horribly maiming many thousands more – atrocities endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians in poll after poll. This deliberate omission of crucial facts that do not fit the desired storyline gives the term “Project Censored” a whole new meaning. The authors also urge readers to “Please contribute financially” to the International Solidarity Movement, an organization notorious for its support of Palestinian terror organizations.