Harv's Corner 01/29/2024

Small but growing group spreads denial of attack on Israel
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By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN Washington Post​

"UNCENSORED TRUTHS", a Telegram group with 2,958 subscribers active on foreign policy and the supposed perils of vaccination, falsely report that Secretly, Israel was behind the massacre. They argue the Oct. 7 attack was a "false flag" staged by the Israelis — likely with help from Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza.

When she first heard about Hamas' 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 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' breach of the border — a strike Israel says left some 1,200 dead, the most deadly 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 hos-tages Hamas took into Gaza were actually kidnapped by Israel. Some contend the U.S. is behind the plot.
These untrue and misleading narratives have been seeded on social media, where hashtags 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 such cities as London and Chicago. At a City Council meeting in Oakland, Calif., several residents disputed the veracity of the attack.

"Israel murdered their own people on Oct. 7," said Christina Gutierrez, an analyst in the city's housing department, where some in the crowd shouted "antisemitism isn't real." Gutierrez didn't 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.
In Ukraine and other conflict zones, smartphones coupled with the velocity of social networks allow the public to witness events in real time, providing a sense of "ground truth" about far-flung incidents.
But social media is an equally potent tool for distortion with t he power to erase and twist history.

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.

"So basically the Hamas attack was a false flag for Israel to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians," reads a recent post on the Reddit forum r/LateStage- Capitalism. "Expected behavior from nazi wannabes."

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.

One Grayzone story quotes an Israeli helicopter pilot describing difficulty distinguishing between civilians and Hamas on Oct 7. But the account distorts his testimony, in which he describes in Hebrew the dilemma of facing so many terrorists, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.

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: "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 'farleft' and 'anti-Israel' will be deployed in order to try to misdirect your readers from our careful, factual reporting."

Two weeks after the Hamas attack, filmmaker Aharon Keshales and his wife were taking a Saturday walk in London when they saw a woman ripping down hostage posters on a bridge.
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The couple, who are Israeli, spoke to the woman, who said she was removing the posters because the people had not been kidnapped by Hamas, according to video of the encounter reviewed by the Post. Keshales said he and his wife told the woman that even Hamas has admitted taking hostages. The woman grabbed the posters and walked away.