A University of North Carolina professor, Omid Safi, has reportedly falsified a blog posting on Israel’s 1948 treatment of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by illustrating it with a photograph that was in fact taken of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The Elder of Zioyon blog, among others, reports that Safi has used this Holocaust concentration camp photograph in posting on the Religion News Service (RNS) blog. The photograph was removed before we visited the site, but it is shown in this image captured from Safi’s posting: This misuse of this Holocaust image illustrates the concept of “Holocaust inversion,” which is used to describe the practice of Jews, Zionists or Israelis of behaving like Nazis or having culpability for Holocaust-like crimes. Holocaust inversion is often described as an indicator of anti-Semitic expression. The U.S. Department of State, for example, has explained this phenomenon as a kind of “Holocaust denial or trivialization” in its report on Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism.” Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is increasingly commonplace, as illustrated by the frequent media images of Israel as a “Nazi-state” during the July-August 2006 conflict between Hizballah and Israel. For instance, in Greece on August 16, 2006, Eleftherotypia, the second-largest daily newspaper, published a cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier praying with a rifle emitting a swastika-shaped cloud of smoke. Holocaust inversion is often used to trivialize the unique horrors of the Holocaust, to downplay the culpability of its perpetrators, or to justify continued animus directed at the Jewish people, especially in the Middle East. It is unfortunate to see this practice used by a university professor at an American public university. Ironically, RNS http://www.religionnews.com/about/ is owned by Religion News LLC, a non-profit, limited liability corporation based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Beyond the other obvious problems with Safi’s distortion of Holocaust memory, his use of the RNS site is also a blatant corruption of journalism.