...When I arrived at the conference, I looked over the information tables. One table offered what can only be described as anti-Israel, anti-U.S. propaganda in the guise of scholarly and professional research society materials. On the bulletin board was a business card for Alison Weir’s IfAmericansKnew.org, an anti-Israel Web site claiming that America’s support of Israel should be terminated, and that a Palestinian state should replace Israel. The site uses misleading statistics to push its hateful message. For instance, the chart depicting American aid to Israel and the Arab world ignores the fact that, while Palestinians receive less U.S. aid than Israel does, the Arab world as a whole gets much more; in addition, aid to Israel is reciprocated through new technology. Also, the Web site’s statistics on Palestinian casualties include suicide bombers and armed combatants as “civilian casualties.”

Weir has also distorted history in the past. She once called a massacre of 60 yeshiva students in Hebron in 1929 by Arabs an “Arab uprising” against Jewish oppression – even before Israel existed. Manipulation of statistics to advance political goals for foreign dictatorships should not be welcome at an academic conference.

At the same table, free copies of a glossy newsmagazine called the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs were being distributed to the academics in attendance. Most people, upon seeing the publication, might assume it was similar to Newsweek or Time; the inside cover claims the report has been “telling the Truth for more than 20 years. … Interpreting the Middle East for North Americans.” What most people don’t know is that the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine and Web site – indeed, the entire organization behind it – are funded by Saudi Arabia, a despotic regime that has been quietly buying its way onto every campus in America, particularly through Middle East Studies centers in the U.S...