The Emergence of October 7th trutherism

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When she first heard about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Mirela Monte was “appalled.” The South Carolina real estate agent and self-described holistic healer detests violence and is horrified by war and human suffering.

But as Monte read more in Uncensored Truths, a Telegram group with 2,958 subscribers active on foreign policy and the supposed perils of vaccination, her shock turned to anger. According to the forum, the news reports were wrong: Secretly, Israel was behind the massacre.
Monte now argues the Oct. 7 attack was a “false flag” staged by the Israelis — likely with help from the Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza. “Pure evil,” she said. “Israel is like a mad dog off a leash.”

The Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack is among the most well-documented in history. A crush of evidence from smartphone cameras and GoPros captured Hamas’s breach of the border — a strike Israel says left about 1,200 dead, the deadliest onslaught in the country’s history.

But Oct. 7 denial is spreading. A small but growing group denies the basic facts of the attacks, pushing a spectrum of falsehoods and misleading narratives that minimize the violence or dispute its origins. Some argue the ambush was staged by the Israeli military to justify an invasion of Gaza. Others say that some 240 hostages Hamas took into Gaza were actually kidnapped by Israel. Some contend the United States is behind the plot.

These untrue and misleading narratives have been seeded on social media, where hashtags and terms linking Israel to “false flag” — a staged event that casts blame on another party — tripled on services including TikTok, Reddit and 4chan in the weeks after the attacks, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit tracking disinformation.

It’s bleeding into the real world: Demonstrators have shouted the claim at anti-Israel protests and have used it to justify removing posters of hostages in cities like London and Chicago. At a November city council meeting in Oakland, Calif., multiple residents disputed the veracity of the attack.

Israel murdered their own people on October 7,” said Christina Gutierrez, an analyst in the city’s housing department, where some in the crowd shouted “antisemitism isn’t real.” Gutierrez did not respond to requests for comment.

The phenomenon is worrisome to Jewish leaders and researchers who see ties to Holocaust denial, the attempt to undermine the genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II, a belief that has surged online. They also see parallels to many pernicious, internet-driven conspiracy theories with antisemitic tentacles, including the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges “globalists” — a reference, some say, to Jews — used the pandemic to control the world, and disinformation about the 9/11 terrorist attack, which some fringe groups falsely argue was perpetrated by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

There’s a built-in audience that wants to deny that Jews are the victims of atrocity and furthers the notion that Jews are secretly behind everything,” said Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer at NCRI.

The head of International Relations for Hamas, Basem Naim, has falsely asserted that the group “didn’t kill any civilians” when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, calling the claim “Israeli propaganda.” Such false claims are finding an audience in a variety of online spaces.

LateStageCapitalism is a community of left-wing activists that bills itself as “A One-Stop-Shop for Evidence of our Social, Moral and Ideological Rot.” But the claim can be found elsewhere on the internet, including publications critical of Israel like Electronic Intifada and Grayzone, and in messaging groups like Monte’s Uncensored Truths, which previously had been focused on pandemic-related gripes about vaccines and conspiratorial ideas about “globalists” ushering in a so-called New World Order. Right-wing Holocaust deniers also have latched onto the claims.

All cherry-pick evidence — some factual, some highly distorted — to push misleading narratives.
Israeli citizens have accused the country’s military of accidentally killing Israeli civilians while battling Hamas on Oct. 7; the army has said it will investigate. But articles on Electronic Intifada and Grayzone exaggerated these claims to suggest that most Israeli deaths were caused by friendly fire, not Hamas.

An Electronic Intifada article from November also argues that “most” Israeli casualties on Oct. 7 were perpetrated by the Israeli army, basing the story, in part, on a YouTube clip of a man who describes himself as a former Israeli general. The clip refers to these outsider observations as “a confession.”

Electronic Intifada executive director Ali Abunimah said in an email: “It would appear that the reach and success of The Electronic Intifada in debunking and exposing the kind of pro-Israel propaganda routinely published by the Washington Post is now causing enough worry that you have been assigned to do a hit piece, in which labels such as ‘far-left’ and ‘anti-Israel’ will be deployed in order to try to misdirect your readers from our careful, factual reporting.”

Holocaust deniers find new allies
Influencers who question the Holocaust are also among those sowing doubt about Oct. 7.
“Despite how it can appear sometimes I don’t actually have an axe to grind with the Jews,” said Owen Benjamin, a comedian who embraces far-right and antisemitic content, in a November post on X. “It’s just the insane Holocaust narrative and fake war atrocities by shoved down our throats as Americans by israel needs constant pushback,” he wrote in apparent reference to the atrocities of Oct. 7.

The current conflict also is helping Holocaust deniers find potential new allies: neo-Nazis have shown up at pro-Palestinian rallies in several states, seizing an opportunity, analysts said, to push antisemitic tropes. And they’ve deployed conspiratorial rhetoric that appeals to different audiences: Dan Hanley, who runs an organization that claims there were no Muslim terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks, posted on X in November that the “Zionist Rothschild cabal et al was behind both the 9-11 and Oct. 7 false flags.”

The election of former president Donald Trump — who fanned the flames of white nationalism with his defense of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville — along with lightly moderated tech services like Telegram, Discord and Gab, have given new life to Holocaust denial, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. Mainstream platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which permitted such content under their policies until recently, have also played a role.

This newer brand of antisemitism has led a generation of young people to dispute the Holocaust. One in five American adults under 30 say they agree the “Holocaust is a myth,” according to a YouGov/Economist poll conducted in the first week of December. More than a fifth say they believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated.

Finkelstein said that conspiracy theories about Oct. 7 are beginning to bleed into the tumult roiling U.S. universities over the war. On X, activists claim Jewish students and “zionists” are “staging false flag hate crimes” against themselves on college campuses. Grayzone called it a “contrived campus antisemitism crisis.”

maybe it was hundreds of deep fake videos that despite the world wide fury at Israel nobody has exposed.

hmm.. Not sure : but this is what was taught in 1975 Parochial school ,, number of Jewish People slaughtered in the holocaust was 3 million , Then by 1979 it was 6 million,and stayed there ever since . Abiguity, causes me to question facts . But not the point of this part of my post .. Why doesn't the Lgbt community lay claim to the amount of deaths by concentration camps of Gay , or disabled persons . Etc....? people with differences where slaughtered right along with
Judiac persons , and other politically incorrect persons in that Country political regime at that time..
[ Just Questioning info] ?? no bias intended towards any group of people .?? please .

American far-right groups not only think that Trump won the election but that he is still President and is using Biden as a front man, that Clinton runs a sex-trade network from the underground cellar of a pizzeria that has no cellar, that Obama is a lizard and a lot of other fairy-tale fantasy theories. Of course some of these people would cook up something similar about Israel. This has very little or anything to do with sane peoples' opinions on Israel, the treatment of the Palestinians or the bombing of Gaza.

You're against 10/7-denialism but seem to be perfectly fine with Gazan Genocide denialism.

If you look at my posts, they have not made the Israelis look like angels.

The difference between cleansing and genocide is the primary goal of the violence. If the primary goal is to kill as many of a group as possible it’s genocide, if it is to get them to move it’s cleansing. Cleansing is often part of genocide and mass murder is often a key tactic of cleansing.
So far there have been little evidence of the primary goal being killing as many as possible, but a plethora of evidence of intent to move the Palestinians somewhere.

But what is the point of this? Genocide and ethnic cleansing are both evil.

If the primary goal is to kill as many of a group as possible it’s genocide, if it is to get them to move it’s cleansing.

You know, I've seen Nazi sympathizers use the same exact talking points with regards to the Holocaust. That it's not "technically" a genocide, because of [insert BS troll logic here]. So let's have a reality check: Six million Jews died in Germany's genocide, true or false?

You know, I've seen Nazi sympathizers use the same exact talking points with regards to the Holocaust. That it's not "technically" a genocide, because of [insert BS troll logic here]. So let's have a reality check: Six million Jews died in Germany's genocide, true or false?

Deplorable = Jeffery Epstein
= Genocide
= Israel
= Hamas

Trump has no love for deplorables (for his version of deplorables )
Perhaps i have no love for Trump or the deplorable things.

Real talk though, aside from some trumped-up fake news about decapitated babies, what exactly is so "deplorable" about Hamas? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. If the IDF have make stuff up about this group to convince us they're evil, how bad can they really be?