Deir Yassin Massacre Remembered

Even though April 9, 1948, is a day of infamy for Palestinians, few commemorative ceremonies will be held. Sixty-Five years ago today organized Jewish terrorist groups, including the Irgun and Stern gangs, attacked the Village of Deir Yassin, a village whose population numbered some 600 people; 112 women children and old men were brutally butchered in a massacre that has been likened to the Babi Yar Nazi massacre of Jews in Kiev, Ukraine. Add insult to injury, some of the survivors were stripped, loaded on flat truck beds, paraded in a demeaning triumphal drive through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods, driven out of town, and shot to death. Under the cover of dark, 55 surviving children were loaded on trucks and dumped in a Jerusalem alleyway. Close to 600 villages were bulldozed and permanently wiped off the map. Some ironies: the Israelis would change the name of the village to Kfar Shaul, move Holocaust survivors into homes that were not destroyed, build a mental institution on the site, and the site itself is within full view of the Holocaust Memorial, a site just recently visited by Barack Obama