RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s one of the grim features of our age that before the bodies are even cold after a terror attack or mass shooting, someone, somewhere, with a sizeable audience, will begin to deny it. Will speculate that it was a fake – a false flag. The salt these conspiracy theories must pour into already gaping wounds. Grieving families are turned into ‘paid actors’, into targets for derision and abuse. The blackest moment in their lives is turned into mere fodder, into content, by those blinded by conspiracism or plain old grift.

After 7 October, Israelis had to endure this – the trauma followed by the denialism – on an unprecedented scale. Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel – in which 1,200 people were butchered, the vast majority of them civilians – is the most deadly per capita terror attack since the Global Terrorism Database began keeping track in 1970. More than one person was killed for every 10,000 Israelis, calculates the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It would be as if 40,000 to 50,000 Americans had died on 9/11. You’d be hard-pressed to meet not only an Israeli, but also a diaspora Jew, who was not personally affected by the slaughter.

Plus, the manner in which this atrocity was conducted was designed to terrorise those who survived it for decades to come. The cold-blooded murders, even of infants. The rape, gang rape and sexual mutilation of women and girls. The horror that was visited upon one community after another – kibbutz to kibbutz, door to door. It was intended to evoke the racist barbarism, the unhinged murderous depravity, Jews founded Israel to escape from. This is why the terrorists filmed and broadcast their genocidal crimes.

7 October was the most documented attack ever, live-streamed from the GoPro cameras of its perpetrators. And yet still it was denied. ‘I’m shown video clips, and then I’m also told that they’re beheading babies. I’m also told that they’re raping women’, said Farhan Siddiqi, imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Washington, DC. ‘And when I go and I investigate those specific reports, I find out that they’re all lies.’ ‘Pro-Palestine’ outlets insisted that it was actually Israel who ‘killed many, if not most, of the civilians’. ‘How the hell did the Israelis not know this was going to happen?… I’m still a little bit down that rabbit hole’, said Roger Waters, a month after the pogrom, declaring there to be ‘something very fishy’ about 7 October. He floated the possibility it might have been a ‘false-flag operation’ – that is, staged by Israel to justify a military response.

All manner of techniques were used to cast doubt on the reality of 7 October, particularly what it inflicted on innocent people. Some of these techniques rely on a grain of truth, or exploit uncertainty around particular claims. Several soldiers and first-responders have claimed that Hamas beheaded babies, but the authorities have been unable to confirm this. Tragically, it seems that a small number of Israeli civilians were killed by ‘friendly fire’ on 7 October, as the IDF went after the hostage-taking pogromists. But these details were then blown out of all proportion, cynically used to rubbish the notion that Hamas committed atrocities at all – and to allege instead that Israel essentially murdered its own citizens en masse before pumping out baseless lies to cover it all up. Zoom out for a moment and you realise what a depraved game is being played here. For instance, are these ghouls not bothered that babies were undoubtedly murdered and burned by Hamas on 7 October? Does it only count if the racist monsters also cut their heads off?

The toxic cynicism that has met reports of Hamas’s depravity has nothing to do with a desire for accuracy and evidence. There is no amount of evidence that will satisfy these people. From the off, there were horrifying indications that women had been a key target of Hamas that day. Footage emerged of kidnapped women with bloodied crotches. Murdered women were found, hands tied and stripped from the waist down. Later on, deeply researched reports by the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times – drawing on eyewitnesses, official accounts and video evidence – detailed rape, sexual torture and genital mutilation (Hamas seemed to extract a particular, perverse thrill from stabbing, shooting and driving nails into women’s vaginas). Even the UN – whose institutional bias against Israel is a running joke – concluded, in a report published in March, that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred’ on 7 October. ‘There are further accounts of individuals who witnessed at least two incidents of rape of corpses of women’, it added. There is reason to believe the rape was systematic, too; documents were found in the possession of Hamas terrorists, explaining how to say ‘Take off your pants’ in Hebrew. But even a year on, with a mountain of evidence beneath us, mention the rape of Israeli women to the apologists and you will get an eye roll.

Where the hardliners deny, the more mainstream sow doubt. The anti-Israel types seem to have come up with an entirely new, Israel-specific standard of journalistic proof. Apparently, unless they are presented with a hi-def snuff movie of the specific alleged crime in question, they cannot possibly assess its truthfulness. No amount of eyewitness testimonies or evidence will suffice, it seems. I suppose we should also free all of the convicted murderers, apart from those who were dumb enough to be caught killing on camera. This led Israel to reluctantly publish images of slain babies, and to hold screenings of footage of Hamas’s crimes, edited to protect the dignity of the dead and defiled. But it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference. Pro-Palestine activists even staged a protest outside of a screening in Los Angeles, denouncing the film as ‘propaganda’.

There are different motivations for this denialism. There are those who simply cannot accept how wrong they were about Israel and Hamas. For many years, Israel’s defences had protected not just Israeli civilians from harm, but also Western woke leftists from the consequences of their luxury beliefs. So long as the Islamist killers were kept at bay, Corbynistas could pretend that Hamas is a group of anti-imperialist resistance fighters – that it didn’t mean all that stuff in its founding covenant about murdering Jews. The pogrom confronted them with the grisly reality. But rather than admit they got this badly wrong, many leftists chose denial instead. They insisted that Our Hamas would never do something like that, even as they were presented with copious evidence to the contrary.

Then there is the anti-Semitism – the unvarnished Jew hatred that drives many of the fantastical and cynical claims about 7 October. This is Holocaust denial redux. For when people deny or downplay the Holocaust they aren’t just dabbling in a deeply offensive and suspect form of revisionist history. Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism – relying, as it does, on age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Namely, that Jews lie and that they exert some kind of hypnotic sway over Western governments and media. Naturally, this has over recent decades become bound up with anti-Israel agitation too, as the more conspiratorial anti-Semites argue that the Shoah was essentially a hoax designed to guilt trip the West into supporting the founding of Israel. It was grimly predictable that 7 October – the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust – would be denied too; used to demonise Israel as a lying, bloodthirsty nation, just as Jews have been demonised as lying and bloodthirsty for millennia.

7 October wasn’t the first Islamist atrocity to be given the tinfoil-hat treatment. More than 20 years on from 9/11, an alarmingly large number of Americans – let alone people in other parts of the world, who have borne the brunt of the American military misadventures that followed – still refuse to believe the ‘official narrative’ about the murderous assault on the World Trade Center. And yet it’s telling that, in 9/11 too, many conspiracy theorists see the secret hand of the Jews. It was ordered by Mossad, they splutter, in league with Jewish American neocons, desperate to invade the Middle East.

Here we see that the world’s oldest hatred is also the world’s most enduring conspiracy theory – ascribing Jews the role of killers, oppressors and master manipulators. Debunking the 7 October denialists is essential, but it sadly won’t be enough, until we can confront the conspiratorial bigotry that sees lying Jews everywhere.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater