If Americans Knew - Positions

Positions

The organization's stated goal is "to inform and educate the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media," going on to say: "It is the goal of If Americans Knew to inform the American public accurately about . Most of all, it is to inform Americans about our enormous, and too often invisible, personal connection to it.".

If Americans Knew maintains that US media are consistently Israeli-centric in their reporting, finding that a great many of the journalists reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have family and personal ties to the Israeli military." The organization has conducted statistical studies on a variety of news organizations, finding that they reported on Israeli deaths at rates many times times greater than they reported on Palestinian deaths. Following their first study, a Stanford professor conducted a similar study and confirmed their findings.

If Americans Knew holds that United States' support of Israel should be reduced on the grounds that it is not in American interest — that it interferes with American relations with the oil-producing nations, costs American taxpayers billions, is increasingly imperiling American lives, and prevents peace.

Executive Director Alison Weir writes that ending such aid would "help bring peace to the Middle East, build a safer world and alleviate massive misery." Another article concludes: "...US aid to Israel has destabilized the Middle East; propped up a national system based on ethnic and religious discrimination; enabled unchecked aggression that has, on occasion, been turned against Americans themselves; funded arms industries that compete with American companies; supported a pattern of brutal dispossession that has created hatred of the US; and resulted in continuing conflict that last year took the lives of 384 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, and that in the past seven and a half years has cost the lives of more than 982 Palestinian children and 119 Israeli children. By providing massive funding to Israel, no matter what it does, American aid is empowering Israeli supremacists who believe in a never-ending campaign of ethnic cleansing; while disempowering Israelis who recognize that policies of morality, justice, and rationality are the only road to peace."

The organization published a handout defending Helen Thomas’s comments when she contended that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to “Germany, Poland, America, and everywhere else.” Alison Weir maintained that the “Nazi holocaust ended well over half a century ago” and it was not inappropriate to insist that Jews return to areas in Europe where they were killed en masse.

The site's homepage shows charts comparing the number of children killed from both sides since year 2000; it also shows the number of killed and injured people from both sides.

It asserts that U.S. support of Israel has long been driven by lobbying on behalf of a foreign government, often via AIPAC, over the objections of State Department and Pentagon experts, and in recent years by the efforts of a "growing number of individuals with close ties to Israel (known as neoconservatives)" in high-level U.S. Government positions.