Monti now says the October 7 attack was a “false flag” raised by the Israelis – likely with help from the Americans – to justify the genocide in Gaza. “Pure evil,” she said. “Israel is like a rabid dog on a leash.”
The terrorist attack launched by Hamas on October 7 is among the most documented attacks in history. A trove of evidence from smartphone cameras and GoPros captured Hamas' breach of the border — a strike that Israel says left some 1,200 people dead, and is the deadliest attack in the country's history.
But October 7 denial is spreading. There is a small but growing group that denies the basic facts of the attacks, pushing a range of lies and misleading narratives that downplay the violence or question its origins. Some believe that the ambush was set up by the Israeli army to justify the invasion of Gaza. Others say that about 240 hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza have already been kidnapped by Israel. Some believe that the United States is behind the conspiracy.
These incorrect and misleading narratives were seeded on social media, where hashtags linking Israel to “false flag” – an organized event that places blame on another party – tripled on services including TikTok, Reddit and 4chan in the weeks following the attacks, According to The Verge. Network Contagion Research Institute, a non-profit that tracks misinformation.
It bleeds over into the real world: Protesters have echoed this claim at anti-Israel protests and used it to justify removing hostage posters in cities like London and Chicago. At a November city council meeting in Oakland, California, many residents questioned the authenticity of the attack.
“Israel killed its own people on October 7,” said Cristina Gutierrez, an analyst with the city’s housing department, while some in the crowd chanted, “Antisemitism is not real.” Gutierrez did not respond to requests for comment.
This phenomenon is worrying for Jewish leaders and researchers who believe that it is related to Holocaust denial and an attempt to undermine the genocide that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews during World War II, a belief that has increased. Connected. They also see similarities with Many are malicious, Internet-driven Conspiracy theories with anti-Semitic tentacles, including the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that “globalists” — a reference, some say, to Jews — have used The pandemic to take over the world, and disinformation about the September 11 terrorist attack, which some fringe groups falsely say was committed by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
“There is an internal constituency that wants to deny that Jews are victims of atrocities and promotes the idea that Jews are secretly behind everything,” said Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer at the National Center of Resistance of Iran.
In Ukraine and other conflict zones, smartphones, combined with the speed of social networks, allow the general public to view events in real time, providing a sense of “ground truth” about distant incidents.
But social media is an equally powerful tool for distortion – and the Internet has a unique power to erase and distort history.
Hamas's director of international relations, Bassem Naim, falsely asserted that the movement “did not kill any civilians” when it attacked Israel on October 7, describing the claim as “Israeli propaganda.” Such false claims find an audience in a variety of online spaces.
“So the Hamas attack was a false flag for Israel to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians,” a recent post on the Reddit forum r/LateStageCapitalism said. “Behaviour Expected from Aspiring Nazis.”
LateStageCapitalism is a community of left-wing activists who describe themselves as “a one-stop shop for evidence of our social, moral, and ideological rot.” But the claim can be found elsewhere online, including publications critical of Israel such as Electronic Intifada and GrayZone, and in message groups such as the censored Monte's Un, which previously focused on pandemic-related complaints about vaccines and conspiratorial thoughts about “preachers for globalization.” Entering into the so-called New World Order. Right-wing Holocaust deniers have also stuck to these claims.
All the evidence is carefully cherry-picked – some factual, some highly distorted – to push misleading narratives.
Israeli citizens accused the state the army's responsibility for mistakenly killing Israeli civilians while fighting Hamas on October 7; The army said it would conduct an investigation. But articles in Electronic Intifada and Grayzone exaggerated these claims to suggest that most Israeli deaths were due to friendly fire, not Hamas.
A Grayzone story quoted an Israeli helicopter pilot describing the difficulty of distinguishing between civilians and Hamas on October 7. But the account distorted his testimony, in which he describes in Hebrew the dilemma of confronting so many terrorists, said Ashiya Shatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli website. A watchdog organization specializing in combating misinformation and hate speech online.
A November Electronic Intifada article also claims that “most” of the Israeli casualties on October 7 were committed by the Israeli military, basing the story, in part, on a YouTube clip of a man describing himself as a former Israeli general. The passage refers to these external observations as “confession.”
“The extent of Electronic Intifada’s reach and its success in exposing and exposing the kind of pro-Israel propaganda that The Washington Post routinely publishes now appears to be causing enough concern that it has been decided,” Ali Abu Nimah, executive director of Electronic Intifada, said in an email. We are tasked with creating a hit piece, where labels like “far-left” and “anti-Israel” will be deployed to try to mislead readers from our accurate and factual reporting.”
Holocaust deniers find new allies
Two weeks after After the Hamas attack, director Aharon Keshalis and his wife were walking around the Primrose Hill section of London on Saturday when they saw a woman tearing down hostage posters on a local bridge.
The couple, who are Israeli, spoke to the woman, who said she was removing the posters because people were not being kidnapped by Hamas, according to a video of the encounter reviewed by The Washington Post. Keshalis said he and his wife told the woman that even Hamas admitted to taking hostages. According to the video, the woman grabbed the posters and walked away.
Kishalis said the incident — which has now been repeated in several cities, according to other videos posted on social media — left him upset.
“Everyone takes a side in every conflict, and that's okay. But bringing it up to Israel is a lie.” “Maybe it's easier to lie than to say, ‘You got what you deserve.'” It's probably easier psychologically than saying, “I hate you.”
Influencers who doubt the Holocaust are also among those sowing doubt about October 7.
“As much as it may seem sometimes I don’t actually have an ax to grind with the Jews,” Owen Benjamin, a comedian who espouses far-right and anti-Semitic content, said in a November post on Channel X. “It is just an insane holocaust,” he wrote in an apparent reference to the atrocities committed on October 7. “The fake war atrocities and atrocities committed at our throats as Americans by Israel need a sustained response.”
The current conflict is also helping Holocaust deniers find potential new allies: Neo-Nazis have appeared at pro-Palestinian rallies in several states, seizing the opportunity, analysts say, to promote anti-Semitic tropes. And they have deployed conspiratorial rhetoric that appeals to different audiences: Dan Hanley, who runs an organization that claims there were no Muslim terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks, posted on X in November that “the Zionist Rothschild gang and others were behind it.” Both September 11 and October 7 are false flags.
Benjamin and Hanley did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Researchers warn that October 7 conspiracy theories may follow a similar trajectory to Holocaust denial, which was waning before social media platforms prompted a resurgence a decade ago.
The election of former President Donald Trump — who fanned the flames of white nationalism by defending a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville — along with Slight moderate 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. Major platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which They allowed such content under their policies until recently, also played a role.
These platforms have enabled extremists to expose their ideas to a greater number of people, replacing the swastika with more widely accepted internet memes such as Pepe the Frog.
This new type of anti-Semitism has led a generation of young people to object to the Holocaust. One in five American adults under the age of 30 say they agree that “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 the Holocaust is exaggerated.
The long tail of Holocaust denial is a lesson in what might have happened on October 7, despite ample documentation of the attacks in real time, said Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, a nonpartisan think tank. He said extremists will lure people who are truly concerned about the atrocities in Gaza, where more than 24,000 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli invasion, into a rabbit hole of conspiracies and misinformation.
“It's generally indisputable that Hamas did something — and the pro-Hamas camp can't completely erase that,” said Brooking, co-author of “The War of Likes: Weaponizing Social Media,” but they can continue to diminish it, and over time, you see a rewriting of the date”.
The researchers pointed out that the erasure of historical memory by online tacticians is not limited to the Holocaust. In both Brazil and Argentina, right-wing groups used disinformation campaigns to cast doubt on established facts about human rights violations under military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. Popular YouTube influencers who support far-right Argentine President Javier Miley increasingly argue that the military's torture and disappearance of tens of thousands of political opponents during that period did not happen, according to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group that recently asked Google to remove the content.
Finkelstein said that conspiracy theories about October 7th are starting to seep into the unrest sweeping American universities over the war. On X, activists claim that Jewish students and “Zionists” are “orchestrating false hate crimes” against themselves on campus. Grayzone called it a “crisis of manufactured anti-Semitism on campus.”
Finkelstein said that while it is reasonable to question the Israeli government's wartime intentions and tactics, efforts to argue that Israel was responsible for the events of October 7 are part of a broader strategy by anti-Semitic extremists to undermine Jewish suffering.
“First you have to prove that your enemies are not really victims or persecutors,” he said. “If your enemies are victims or persecutors, your worldview is meaningless.”
