College Professor Tries to Pass Off Photo from Buchenwald as Deir Yassin

A blog entry on the Religion News Service website by a North Carolina University professor has prompted a strong response from Jewish bloggers.

Omid Safi, professor of Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing” of the indigenous population before and during the War of Independence in 1948. Then he commemorates the alleged Deir Yassin “massacre,” and to illustrate the atrocity he uses a photo of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald complex. As is pointed out by the anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon, who first spotted the falsity, the dead bodies were victims of a Royal Air Force bombing raid in April 1945.

After the photo was spotted and the inaccuracy circulated online, Safi changed the photo with this addendum at the bottom of his article:

“An earlier version of this article had incorrectly used a Google image that was not associated with the Deir Yessin atrocity.    That mistake has been corrected, and I apologize about the mistake.   I have replaced that image with one.”