Teaching the Nakba at Harvard
(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --
Today is the 63d anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. The village lay on the Jewish nationalist fighters' path to Jerusalem, and the massacre by the Irgun sent shockwaves through the city and initiated a flood of refugees. Mazin Qumsiyeh writes about it here.
Last Thursday night my co-editor and I gave a talk at Harvard Law School. We had been told there would be a lot of pro-Israel voices at the talk, and I keyed on the faces of a couple in a back row. They were in their 60s and seemed affluent, the woman's hair was nicely done. I thought their faces looked Jewish. He had a satisfied, successful air. She wore an expensive scarf and seemed unnerved by things we said.
They didn't say anything during the Q-and-A but afterward they came up and gave me a book to sign. The man told me they were doctors in the area, and both Palestinian. Their families had independently fled the country in '48 and made a couple of stops before getting to the U.S.
I said I'm sorry, and he shrugged and said, "You are not responsible. It happened a long time ago. We did fine."
His wife did not agree with him. She fastened on me with her big dark eyes and thanked me for my talk and then then spoke in a tumbling manner. Her family was from Haifa. They had Jewish friends, they had been told that everything would be OK and just ride it out. Then attacks began on Palestinians (yes I know, they went both ways; but one side was stronger) and the family had to leave. They'd gone from Lebanon to the U.S. Her father had lost his business.
"We were told to forget. We were told not to think of ourselves as Palestinians," she said, getting more and more upset. In the last two or three years she has started writing to recover that experience. She has written a couple of hundred pages.
"I want to find out who I am, I want to find out what was taken from me when I was little. I'm not too old."...MORE...LINK
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The ghosts of Deir Yassin
The element of surprise was lost and the house-to-house fighting was bitter.
(JPost.com) -- By YEHUDA AVNER --
In October 1952, I attended a debate at the Oxford Union between a Dr. Ali el-Husseimi, adviser to the Secretary General of the Arab League Abdul-Khalek Hassouna, and Dr. Gershon Levy, adviser to prime minister David Ben-Gurion. The motion was, "This House Condemns Zionism as Imperialism." Gershon Levy I knew. He had lectured at a course I attended in Jerusalem some years before. As their war of words mounted, the contenders, fighting fire with fire, sought to clinch their arguments with every verbal device they could muster in an effort to vanquish the other over the slaughter that had occurred in a place called Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin - now Har Nof - was an Arab village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. It was located across the valley from Beit Hakerem where I was lodging. In the early spring of 1948, Deir Yassin gunmen began taking potshots at Beit Hakerem and other nearby neighborhoods, and at dawn on Friday, April 9, Menachem Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi, assisted by members of the Stern Group, attacked the village. I was 18 at the time, and this is what I scribbled in my diary: "Practically knocked out of bed by big explosion at 5 a.m. and then another at 7 a.m. They were explosions from Deir Yassin, a village across the valley. Told that IZL and Lehi attacked the village. Had always been very quiet and quite friendly. Told that Arab gangs had pushed themselves in. Went at 10 a.m. to investigate. Crawled down valley behind rock. Could see Jews maneuvering into positions. Crashed Jewish lorry on hill. "Hagana asked for reinforcements for wounded etc. Village captured by 2 p.m. Jewish flag raised over destroyed mukhtar's house. "Prisoners taken around town by terrorists [sic] in lorry with their hands up. Idea is to bolster morale. Rumored they were to be shot.... Walking home we saw the captured women and children in a truck. They just stared. Many Jews around. I felt ashamed the way they cheered. Told that Hagana were going to hand them over to the British." AND NOW, more than four years later, there I sat crammed into the spectators' gallery of the Oxford Union, looking down on a chamber packed with students listening to Dr. Ali el-Husseini lashing out at Dr. Gershon Levy over what he asserted was a deliberate Jewish massacre at Deir Yassin. "Menachem Begin," he raged, "stands indicted as a war criminal for the deliberate brutal massacre of 254 innocent men, women and children at Deir Yassin. He ordered his thugs to descend upon this quiet village, savage its women, throw scores of mutilated bodies down the village wells, and burn the rest. Those who survived the massacre were, at Begin's command, loaded onto trucks and paraded throughout Jewish Jerusalem, to be stoned and spat upon, before being taken to a nearby quarry to be shot." Then, thunderously, bitterly, in a tear-smothered voice: "What happened at Deir Yassin was emblematic of the notorious and horrific totality of Zionist massacres and imperialist crimes committed against the Palestinian people. The Deir Yassin massacre and the resultant terror that seized the Palestinian people marked the beginning of the depopulation of Arab Palestine. For millions upon millions of Arabs this tiny village has become a symbol of Zionist imperialistic perfidy, brutality and aggression."WITH THAT, he sat down and Gershon Levy jumped up. In an incensed voice that lifted to a shout stopping all applause dead, he fumed, "What this House has just heard is an elaborate exercise in Arab myth-making. On trial here is not what happened at Deir Yassin but what has been invented about Deir Yassin." And now, tersely, vigorously, powerfully, as an attorney might address a jury, he made his points - that Deir Yassin, high on a ridge overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, was a place of strategic importance in a life-and-death struggle for Jewish survival; that on Menachem Begin's orders a loudspeaker mounted on a truck had forewarned its inhabitants of the impending assault, thereby surrendering the element of surprise; that the fighting was house-to-house and, therefore, murderous, causing heavy civilian casualties; and that the number of dead was less than half of what Arab propaganda alleged. Turning now to Ali el-Husseini he said to him in a voice as cold as his eyes: "I would advise you, sir, not to don the cloak of hypocrisy before an audience as perceptive as this. You cannot pull wool over their eyes, as the show of hands shall presently reveal. For they know it to be true that we Jews, unlike you Arabs, are not a martial people. And unlike the Arab nation" - he was talking to the students again - "the legendary heroes of the Jewish nation are not warriors and conquerors, but prophets and scribes....MORE...LINK
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Judeofascists specialize in torture, murder and terror:
Jews and Communism
Winston Churchill: There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creating of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly the very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders... In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astounding. And the prominent if not the principal part in the system of terrorism applied by the extraordinary Commissions for combating Counter Revolution has been take by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.
("Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." Illustrated Sunday Herald, London, February 8, 1920.)
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"The Red Terror became so wide-spread that it is impossible to give here all the details of the principal means employed by the [Jewish] Cheka(s) to master resistance; one of the most important is that of hostages, taken among all social classes. These are held responsible for any anti-Bolshevist movements (revolts, the White Army, strikes, refusal of a village to give its harvest etc.) and are immediately executed. Thus, for the assassination of the Jew Ouritzky, member of the Extraordinary Commission of Petrograd, several thousands of them were put to death, and many of these unfortunate men and women suffered before death various tortures inflicted by cold-blooded cruelty in the prisons of the Cheka. I have in front of me photographs taken at Kharkoff, in the presence of the Allied Missions, immediately after the Reds had abandoned the town; they consist of a series of ghastly reproductions such as: Bodies of three workmen taken as hostages from a factory which went on strike. One had his eyes burnt, his lips and nose cut off; the other two had their hands cut off.
The bodies of hostages, S. Afaniasouk and P. Prokpovitch, small landed proprietors, who were scalped by their executioners; S. Afaniasouk shows numerous burns caused by a white hot sword blade. The body of M. Bobroff, a former officer, who had his tongue and one hand cut off and the skin torn off from his left leg. Human skin torn from the hands of several victims by means of a metallic comb. This sinister find was the result of a careful inspection of the cellar of the Extraordinary Commission of Kharkoff. The retired general Pontiafa, a hostage who had the skin of his right hand torn off and the genital parts mutilated. Mutilated bodies of women hostages: S. Ivanovna, owner of a drapery business, Mme. A.L. Carolshaja, wife of a colonel, Mmo. Khlopova, a property owner. They had their breasts slit and emptied and the genital parts burnt and having trace of coal.
Bodies of four peasant hostages, Bondarenko, Pookhikle, Sevenetry, and Sidorfehouk, with atrociously mutilated faces, the genital parts having been operated upon by Chinese torturers in a manner unknown to European doctors in whose opinion the agony caused to the victims must have been dreadful. It is impossible to enumerate all the forms of savagery which the Red Terror took. A volume would not contain them. The Cheka of Kharkoff, for example, in which Saenko operated, had the specialty of scalping victims and taking off the skin of their hands as one takes off a glove...At Voronege the victims were shut up naked in a barrel studded with nails which was then rolled about. Their foreheads were branded with a red hot iron five pointed star. At Tsaritsin and at Kamishin their bones were sawed...At Keif the victim was shut up in a chest containing decomposing corpses; after firing shots above his head his torturers told him that he would be buried alive. The chest was buried and opened again half an hour later when the interrogation of the victim was proceeded with. The scene was repeated several times over. It is not surprising that many victims went mad."
(S.P. Melgounov, p. 164-166; The Secret Powers Behind Revolution, by Vicomte Leon De Poncins, p. 151-153).
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Violent, wild-eyed, Jewish "inglorious basterds": possessed, schizophrenic, or products of their ethno-culture of murderous ambition and race hatred?
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