Alison Weir (activist): Wikis

Note: Many of our articles have direct quotes from sources you can cite, within the Wikipedia article! This article doesn't yet, but we're working on it! See more info or our list of citable articles.

There are two prominent Alison Weirs.

(1) One, an American, is a writer-speaker-analyst on Israel-Palestine.

(2) The other, English, is a historian who writes books on British royalty.

(1) American writer-speaker-analyst on Israel-Palestine

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew who speaks and writes about Israel-Palestine, with particular focus on US media coverage of this issue.

In February 2001 Weir resigned her position as editor of the Sausalito, California community newspaper, and traveled to the West Bank and Gaza as a freelance reporter. She found a situation largely the reverse of what was being reported by the American media.

Disturbed that American citizens were being "misinformed and uninformed on one of the most significant issues affecting them today, and discovering the problem to be systemic, she founded an organization to be directed by Americans without bias and ethnic ties to the region who would research and actively disseminate accurate information to the American public."

She speaks throughout the US on this issue and has received plaudits from diverse sources:

“Ms. Weir presents a powerful, well documented view of the Middle East today. She is intelligent, careful, and critical. American policy makers would benefit greatly from hearing her first-hand observations and attempting to answer the questions she poses.”

Tom Campbell,
Former Congressman and Dean of Haas School of Business

In March of 2004, Weir was inducted into honorary membership of Phi Alpha Literary Society, founded in 1845 at Illinois College. The award cited her as a: “Courageous journalist-lecturer on behalf of human rights. The first woman to receive an honorary membership in Phi Alpha history.”

In 2008 Weir was involved in a minor flap when Greenwich, Connecticut resident Jon McGillion brought Ms. Weir to booked a talk by Weir in a room at the public library open for public use. The library first tried to cancel the talk on the grounds that a sensitivity clause in its Meeting Facility Policy allowed the cancellation of talks that are disruptive to providing service to the community. In the end, the talk went forward.<ref>[340]</ref>

Peter Applebome, a reporter for the New York Times attended and described a "skilled presentation... that mixed fact, purported fact and advocacy to argue not just that the United States was to blame for arming Israeli aggression, but that the war in Iraq was largely the result of neocons with strong ties to Israel supporting Israeli interests." <ref>[348]</ref>
Weir showed a film that claimed that Israel was inflicting on Palestinians “exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews.” <ref>[349]</ref>

Describing a speech in 2008 in Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York Times wrote: "When the speech ended, Ms. Weir was met with thunderous applause, and across the room there was a widespread sense of satisfaction that someone was saying what needed to be said."

An article in the Northwestern Chronicle describes Weir's presentation as, " filled with lie after lie, distortion after distortion, and propaganda after propaganda."
<ref> "Weir delivers bias, bigotry in anti-Israel talk: Journalist's biased claims go unchallenged," richard Goldberg, Northwestern Chronicle, 11-15-2001 [341]</ref>

External links

(1) American

(2) British Historian
Alison Weir (born 1951) is a British writer of history books for the general public, mostly in the form of biographies about British royalty.

She currently lives in Surrey, England, with her two children, John and Kate.

Before becoming an author, Weir worked as a teacher of children with special needs. She received her formal training in history at teacher training college.

Weir retains a wide following of loyal readers. Most of her books are best-sellers in the UK. In 2007, she completed her first novel Innocent Traitor, based on the life of Lady Jane Grey (1537–1554) Her next novel is also to be fictional.

This novel will be dealing with the life, of Queen Elizabeth I,before her accession to the throne, publication of which is expected in 2008 in the UK and United States

According to the London Times, "Alison Weir has established quite a reputation for herself as a bestselling biographer, bringing to a mass audience her insights into the lives of past men and particularly of past women that the academics have been too busy dissecting to portray as flesh and blood." However, " what Weir lacks above all else is precisely that discrimination in the use of evidence that sets the professional apart from the amateur historian.... The effect of this, after a hundred pages or so, is a sort of tinnitus of error and confusion ringing in the reader’s ear, drowning out whatever good qualities Weir’s history might otherwise claim to possess... University librarians should not allow it within a hundred miles of an undergraduate readership."<ref> [347]</ref>

Bibliography

Nonfiction

Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy (latest edition, 2002)

The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991)

The Princes in the Tower (1992)

The Wars of the Roses (1995)

Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII (1996, later reissued as The Children of Henry VIII)

The Life of Elizabeth I (1998)

Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (1999)

Henry VIII: The King and His Court (2001)

Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (2003)

:This is the biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband Lord Darnley, the parents of King James I of England (VI of Scotland) who became king of both countries in 1603 and who fathered Charles I of England and Scotland. Charles was beheaded at the end of the Second English Civil War in 1649.

Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England (2005)

Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess (2007)

The Lady in the Tower (2009)

(2) British

Official Site

Random House UK minisite

Random House US minisite