The Disturbing Rise Of October 7th Denialism

Less than 4 months after Hamas slaughtered over 1,200 unarmed civilians and released videos of the massacre, Jew-haters are denying it ever happened.

Photo: Manuel Cortina/NurPhoto via AP

by Justin Rosario

This week, I was going to write a fun article mocking Rand Paul, his racist father Ron, and how libertarianism is just another facade for white supremacy. But then I saw this article in the Washington Post and all of that went out of the window:

There are days where it feels like I’m screaming into the void and no one really listens. I say this because I see things coming weeks or months in advance, write about them, and when they happen, somehow, everyone is surprised. 

I do not have the power to see the future. I am not a prophet. I do not possess a supernatural gift or vast intellect. What I do have is a willingness to say things that people find uncomfortable regardless of the consequences of speaking that truth. Fortunately, Ben Cohen allows me that freedom despite the fact it has cost The Banter no small number of subscriptions. But the truth is the truth and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll look away. Especially from Jew-hating atrocity-denying assholes like this.

This was always going to happen

A little over a month ago, Steven Spielberg announced he was going to make a movie to document the atrocities of October 7th. The ceasefire crowd flew into a fury because apparently documenting the death of Jews means justifying war crimes. This of course makes no sense unless the movie ends with Spielberg calling for mass murder (it won’t). 

I understood immediately what I was looking at and the underlying premise of the freak-out:

After the end of WWII, when the world was exposed to the horrors of the Nazi death camps, it recoiled. Not only did antisemitism become socially unacceptable, fascism became politically toxic.

As long as the Holocaust was understood far and wide and inextricably linked to antisemitism and fascism, both projects were untenable. Therefore, The Holocaust had to be diminished.

I likened the hostile pushback on talking about 10/7 to Holocaust Denial because they are the same thing. They serve the exact same purpose; to erase the impact of a horror with the intent of making it easier and more acceptable to hate Jews:

The last thing the rabid Jew-haters of the world want is for people to feel any kind of sympathy for the Jewish people, especially if they’re trying to portray any attack on Israel as a valiant struggle for freedom.

A month later, we’ve arrived exactly where the blind hatred of Jews was always going to lead us. The attack was fake all along:

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.

It’s really important to keep in mind that there are hours of video of the attacks. A lot of it provided by Hamas itself. The terrorists recorded themselves murdering 1,200 unarmed civilians and then posted it online for the world to see. They bragged about the women and girls they raped, tortured, and murdered.

But the Jew-haters have to erase Hamas’ atrocities in order to preserve their simplistic good guy-bad guy narrative. To acknowledge that Hamas is actually a group of deeply evil people is to admit that Jews were the victims on 10/7.

Would that erase the subsequent guilt of the IDF and the Israeli government? No. They are still committing their own atrocities even today. But we can’t have a nuanced, grown-up conversation about the fact that there are no good guys in this conflict.

The conversation that is allowed is that Jews are “oppressors” and crimes committed against them are not really crimes. They are justified. By literally anyone, even modern-day slavers like the Houthis and repressive theocratic regimes like Iran:

This was a real conversation between real people. It is amazing to watch the unadultered gibberish coming from the cosplay socialist’s mouth. This is the result of a worldview where anyone opposed to the United States and Israel is absolved of their sins no matter what.

This is how genocides happen. If Jews are the villains, then nothing done to them is wrong. Or it didn’t really happen. Or The Jews are to blame all along:

“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 [Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation].

…

“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.

“Antisemitism isn’t real.” A statement that only a Jew-hater could say with a straight face while claiming that Israel murdered 1,200 of its own people. I’ve long said that the right thinks of Jews as the supervillains of their little dramas. How depressing to discover that the post-left is teaching people to think exactly the same thing. 

The least surprising part of all this is that neo-Nazis are starting to mingle with the ceasefire crowd for recruiting purposes:

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.”

I’ve discussed before how hate is fungible. Once you hate one group, it is astonishingly easy to have that hate extend to other groups. White nationalists have been successfully recruiting misogynists for years in just this fashion. They will no doubt find many new recruits in the coming months. 

This is why the longer these protests go on, the less organic they feel. Who protests a cancer hospital? Why only focus your rage on Democrats when Republicans are openly calling for the death of every Palestinian? Why claim Jewish doctors and nurses want to kill Black people? None of it makes sense if you’re protesting Israel and defending Palestinians. But it makes perfect sense if you’re trying to radicalize people away from the left and pull them into the hate-filled conspiracy world of the right.

Someday, someone is going to bother looking into who is funding and organizing these “grassroots” protests that constantly swerve into extreme hatred of Jews masquerading as leftism. I promise you, they will be shocked to discover that they were never grassroots and the people behind them do not care one whit about defending Palestinians. 

The uncomfortable truth is that the pro-Palestinian protests are fast becoming hate marches against Jew. “From the river to the sea” chant after all has nothing to do with Palestinian self determination — it is an explicit call for the murder of all Jews in Israel.

The post-Left cease fire crowd had their chance to rein in the ugliest elements of the movement months ago and chose not to. Therefore we can stop pretending their protests are not about hating Jews. It was always about hating Jews and now the world can see it.

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