10/7 Denial - TRIGGER WARNING

[StDuBois]

TRIGGER WARNING - (SA, infanticide, torture)

If you are not Jewish or Israeli, I implore you to read this, especially if you have been denying the scale of the 10/7 massacre.

The 10/7 massacre was live-streamed by the perpetrators on their own social media platforms.

Initially, antisemites celebrated. After more and more heinous, indefensible details started to come out, antisemites started denying it happened at all.

A PHENOMENON NOT UNLIKE HOLOCAUST DENIAL

Holocaust denial is an antisemitic and anti-Romani conspiracy that denies or distorts the established facts about the Nazi genocide of Jews and Roma.

In 1996, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, wrote a briefing paper for the US Department of State titled “The 8 Stages of Genocide.” In 2012, the paper was amended to add two more stages. According to Genocide Watch, the tenth and final stage of genocide is denial.

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Distortion of the Holocaust is rhetoric, written work, or other media that excuse, minimize, or misrepresent the known historical record.” A danger of Holocaust distortion is that from the outside, it might appear more credible than outright Holocaust denial. According to the IHRA Honorary Chairman Yehuda Bauer, “A half truth is worse than a full lie.”

Like Holocaust denial, 10/7 denial is not necessarily an outright denial that the massacre happened, but it can be a distortion of facts. For example, just like many Holocaust deniers claim that the Holocaust did indeed happen, but that it was only a plot for the Zionists to “get” Israel, 10/7 deniers can claim that 10/7 happened as a ploy for Israel to re-occupy the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the Nazis, who went through great lengths to cover up their crimes at the tail end of the war, the perpetrators of 10/7 gleefully live-streamed their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

NO, THE IDF DID NOT KILL ISRAELIS

Like Holocaust deniers of days past, 10/7 deniers are now blaming Israelis for their own massacre.

After the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article in which one anonymous police officer said that the police is looking into the possibility that some of the victims of the Nova music festival massacre were killed by fire from an IDF military chopper, antisemites took the statement out of context, distorted it, and disseminated it all the media and the internet.

In response to the Haaretz article, the Israeli police put out a statement that the investigation was only in regard to police activities on October 7, not military activities, and that as such, they do not have “any indication about the harm to civilians due to aerial activity there.”

The police later asked the press to “take responsibility for their publications and only base stories on official sources.”

Regardless, the conspiracy has taken a life of its own, so much so that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of carrying out the massacre. Abbas later retracted his statement.

(TW)

YES, HAMAS RAPED WOMEN AND GIRLS

First, a question for the feminists: do you generally question survivors’ stories of sexual assault, or do you only do so when they are Israeli?

After the pro-Hamas crowd realized you cannot defend gang rape as a legitimate form of “decolonization” or “resistance,” they decided to deny that any such assaults took place.

While eyewitness testimony should be enough, apparently it’s not. But despite the fact that most of the bodies were charred or mutilated beyond recognition, the physical evidence still exists: “There is evidence of mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children,” according to a morgue worker.

“Many of the victims were in conditions too severe to identify, naked, and with clear signs of sexual assault,” according to the police.
In a video which was screened for journalists but has not been made available to the general public, “…a woman is unclothed from the waist down, with her underpants hanging off one thigh. She is lying face down and is dead. In another, a mutilated dead woman has her dress hitched up to her waist, with no underpants.”

The eyewitness testimony is just as harrowing. An eyewitness described an instance of gang rape: “He is here raping her…and then they pass her on to another person…she stood on her feet, she was bleeding from her back…[one of the terrorists] slices her breast and throws it on the road, and they’re playing with it. Afterwards, someone really penetrates her and shoots her in the head before he finishes. It’s not like he ejaculates and picks up his pants…He shoots her in the head while he’s still inside of her.”

“Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends' bodies, dead bodies,” said a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre.

(TW)

YES, HAMAS BEHEADED BABIES

After President Biden clarified that he had not personally seen images of beheaded babies, conspiracy theorists went into a frenzy. So let’s make this clear once and for all: yes, Hamas beheaded Israeli babies.

This has now been independently verified by a group of international forensic pathologists, though the corpses were so badly burnt that it’s impossible to discern whether the babies were decapitated before or after being set on fire.

Israel showed US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken photographic evidence of those decapitations, which he has verified, and the photos, which are extremely graphic, were published to the Israeli Prime Minister’s office Twitter.

(TW)

DID HAMAS BURN A BABY IN AN OVEN?

According to an Israeli first responder and witness, Asher Moskowitz, yes: “The body hardened and, unfortunately, appeared to have also swollen…And really, the heating element of the oven was on the body itself.”

This has yet to be verified by a third party.

NO, HAMAS IS NOT HUMANE

Do we even have to say this?
After disturbing security camera footage emerged of Hamas terrorists dragging two Nepalese hostages through Al Shifa Hospital, which has long been known to be their main headquarters, Hamas apologists started praising Hamas for supposedly giving the hostages medical attention.

So let’s make two things clear: (1) you don’t get to blow someone’s leg off and then call yourself “humane” because you then got them medical attention, and (2) there are at least five other hospitals between the site where the hostages were abducted and Al Shifa Hospital. The terrorists took them to Al Shifa not because they wanted to give them medical attention, but because Al Shifa is a Hamas base.

Similarly, people called Hamas humane after released hostage Yokheved Lifshitz, 85, said that the guards assigned to her didn’t hurt her and that she was fed, received medication, and was kept in clean condition. Of course, she also said she was beaten when she was abducted, though Hamas apologists leave out that part. Additionally, her husband is still captive, so of course she wouldn’t want to say anything to the media that would jeopardize his safety. Finally, photos from before and after the kidnapping show that Lifshitz lost a drastic amount of weight while in captivity.

To reiterate: you don’t get to violently abduct civilians and then call yourself humane.

Hamas is not denying the massacre. So why are you?

(credit - Debbie Lechtman at Roots Metals)

If you want to talk about the IDF there are numerous other threads on the topic.

People shouldn't have sympathy for Hamas, they also shouldn't have sympathy for the IDF.

Yuk, the defence of Hamas gets worse by the minute.

People should have sympathy for the innocent Palestinians.
They also should have sympathy for the victims of 7/10.

You you haven’t refuted the argument though have you? All you’ve done is to say, “these (two!) Israelis think Y, therefore Y is true” without going into the actual details of what they’re saying, then explaining why you think they are credible and backing it up with evidence. Or indeed explaining what you actually think, just taking other people’s word for it. That shows an astonishing lack of intellectual engagement with the discussion at hand.

A key difference between the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict and South African apartheid is that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank—checkpoints, movement restrictions, and so forth—are rooted in legitimate security concerns rather than racism. Because the world now seems to have become desensitised to the word security through overuse, it is crucial to remember what it really means. Security means preventing what happened on October 7—which Hamas has promised to over and over again if given the chance.

Many who are critical of Israel jump on the idea that defenders of South African apartheid also used “security” as a justification for the apartheid system. The difference is that in the case of South Africa, it was a false pretext. In apartheid South Africa, marriage (and even sex) between blacks and whites was punishable by prison time. South African officials would decide your race (and therefore your fate) by running a comb through an individual’s hair. If it ran all the way through without too much resistance, you were considered legally white.

Such policies, which formed the cornerstone of apartheid South Africa, were not the result of security concerns but of an ideological obsession with racial classification and a horror at the thought of “race-mixing.” Such policies would be unthinkable in Israel, where Arab Israelis are full citizens, where they have the right to vote, serve in the Israeli parliament and the Knesset, and sit on the Supreme Court.

As with every society on earth, there is racism in Israel - and no doubt that extends into the occupied areas of the West Bank. But frankly, if you’re looking for the closest analogue to the racist propaganda experienced by blacks in European-offshoot societies, you will find it not on the Israeli side but on the Palestinian side. Have you seen the ghoulish, antisemitic TV programs that indoctrinate Palestinian children? Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews from when they start nursery. In I can. Nothing even remotely like this takes place in Israel. Hating Palestinians isn’t on the curriculum for their children.

Occupation is terrible for the occupied. It is not a blessing for the occupiers either. But falsely labelling Israel an apartheid state is not just a smear on the region’s only democracy - and a highly problematic one at that given the fact that it’s a lie started and propagated by the Soviet Union in the 1960s when it was severely oppressing its Jewish population and was worried about the backlash from the international community - but a barrier to a peace process and solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. Demonising Israel, singling it out for criticism and holding it to standards never applied to other countries, drives people apart and makes dialogue and discussion more remote. It also gives the Palestinian leadership the impression that pressure from organisations like Amnesty or the West might lead to a Palestinian state, when this will only in fact be achieved by building trust, by negotiation and compromise.

These campaigns lead to racism on the streets of Britain, too, because they fuel anti-Israel obsession (I would go so far as to call it a cult now) and are used to justify attacks on people who are identified with or support the Jewish state. For example, those men who drove all the way down from Bradford in 2021 to drive around North London in cars draped with Palestinians flags chanting “f*ck the Jews, r@pe their daughters”. This exactly the type of scenario such lies lead to….

You talk of facts without giving any at all. You appeal only to those you consider an authority (a value judgement). That doesn’t reflect t well on you at all.

I’m not going to argue each point with you.

But if you’re such an expert in this area, as you claim, it should be easy to go through each one of my arguments and pick them apart, surely. You’re an expert right? I’d you don’t we can only conclude that you are unable to.

You hold a fundamentally different belief to me (and the UN and major human rights organizations)

That’s true, I guess the difference between yiu and me is that I can argue my case and back by views up with evidence and you can’t. But apparently you know everything, you just refuse to demonstrate it. Not suspicious at all.

Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories

No at this* moment *Gaza is not an occupied territory. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip. In other words, Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip, removing every single soldier and civilian — sometimes forcefully — from Gaza. Since 2005, Gaza has not been under Israeli occupation.

Two hours — no, that’s not a typo — two hours after Israel withdrew, Hamas fired its first barrage of missiles at Israeli civilians. Additionally, Gazans destroyed some $14 million worth of infrastructure that Israel had left behind.

In January 2006, Hamas then went on to win the parliamentary elections in Gaza. In June 2007,. they conducted an incredibly violent military coup, removing the entirety of the opposition — Fatah — from the Strip (they threw their
opponents off buildings).

Since then, Hamas has fired over 25,000 missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, which they fire from their own civilian areas. This constitutes a double war crime.

A definition of apartheid is laid out in two treaties and Amnesty lays out plenty of real life examples in the report as to how Israel’s treatment of Palestinian’s meets the points in both of those definitions.

Yes, Both the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statutes actually define apartheid. According to these statutes apartheid refers to crimes against humanity that are based on race only as strictly defined – not due to political, national, ethnic, cultural, religious and gender differences as the Rome Statute makes clear. As neither Jews nor Palestinians are a race, the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be apartheid. While there are other crimes against humanity that cover conflicts like this one, apartheid as defined by international statutes does not apply.

The bad faith actors (yes I mean Amnesty International and others) accusing Israel of apartheid realised this problem so they modified the meaning of ‘racial’ in the Rome Statute to incorporate national and ethnic identity groups, which is an egregious falsification of international law. Meanwhile, cynical proponents of the apartheid label use it to isolate and demonise Israel but know it does not hold.

I have no idea about Hamas’s real aims

Yes you do! It’s in their charter. The 1988 Hamas Charter is openly antisemitic, so much so that the Anti-Defamation League describes it as reading like “a modern-day Mein Kampf.” Article 22, for example, blames Jews for just about every calamity in history dating back to the French Revolution. Article 7 calls for the complete annihilation of the Jewish People. Article 32 references The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulently antisemitic text that influenced Hitler. Hamas openly denies the Holocaust.

My god, I don’t think they could be any clearer.

A person can’t just post one report and claim that is true

Fair enough, but then which part of the OP do you find inaccurate. Can you point out the parts you buy and explain why with evidence.

…but say every report on isreal’s crimes is nonsense

No, I’m just saying the Amnesty “apartheid” report is bunk and for that reason, very easily debunkable.

I would also be wary about speaking about the UN as if is some great moral arbiter - it’s not. Every single permanent member of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — has a history of systemic and institutional antisemitism.

In China, for instance, as of 2018, the Chinese government has engaged in an intense crackdown on Kaifeng Jewry. Government officials raided the small synagogue, tore down Hebrew signs and scripture, and destroyed the mikvah. Experts worry that the community of ~1000 Jews will soon face similar treatment to that of Uyghur Muslims.

France, too, has a long history of antisemitism, including ethnic cleansing, and as of 2020, an American Jewish Committee survey found that 23% of French Jews have been victims of physical antisemitic attacks. Russia has one of the gravest records of antisemitism in the world, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. The United Kingdom also has a history of pogroms and Jewish ethnic cleansing: Jews were banned from England between 1290 and 1657, and the recent Labour Party antisemitism scandal has made it clear to Jews that British antisemitism is not a thing of the past.

Though only 2% of the American population, Jews are the victims of 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes and about 10% of all hate crimes, meaning they are the most disproportionately targeted minority in the United States.

As of 2013, the State of Israel, the only Jewish majority state, where nearly 50% of the world’s Jews live, was condemned in 45 resolutions, accounting for 45% of ALL UN resolutions. In 2020, alone, Israel was condemned in 17 resolutions, compared to 6 resolutions for the rest of the world combined.

Whatever one thinks of Israel’s policies, it’s impossible not to see the double standards. Israel is a country the size of New Jersey with just 9.2 million people (for comparison, the United States has 329.5 million people, France has 67.39 million people, Egypt has 102.3 million people, and there are about 9 million people in New York City alone). It’s ludicrous that such a small country with such a small population could account for nearly 50% of the world’s injustices. It’s simply not reasonable or logical to argue this point.

I haven't watched many videos of October 7th. This is the parents of a girl killed at the festival talking about what happened and how they tried to get to the festival to save her. Just a normal girl off to a festival to see her favourite DJ with her boyfriend. Identified by her fingerprints.

It's a normal family sharing their experience of that day and they will never be the same again. That day changed the lives of so many.

Owen Jones has actually watched the footage that the Israeli government has been showing journalists, and manages to have a good crack at denial and minimising himself. Odious man.

Here is some further testimony from one of the rescue workers. How anyone can doubt his sincerity and his deep distress I do not know.
Please note very harrowing details are included.
https://twitter.com/Michael_Wgd/status/1729500200740208862

Harrowing.

@SomeCatFromJapan I can't even bring myself to read any of the drivel he writes....

Can we please put the flag thing to bed?!
I was there on Sunday. There weren’t many. About 10% of the number of Palestinian flags in other marches. If you object to a few Israeli flags why aren’t you objecting to the Palestinian flags? Unless it for the very obvious reason.

Sorry wrong thread!

https://x.com/yashar/status/1729630529199432095?s=20

Have the Americans lost their actual minds?!

It sure seems that way 😳

People seem to think Hamas' terror attack on Israel was some kind of spur of the moment "enough is enough" kind of thing, as opposed to something they'd been planning for over a year, some saying probably more like two. It was planned, calculated and well-thought out. They knew where they were going, they knew what their mission was and they knew where to hide the hostages once back in Gaza.

It was a terror attack. I can't get over the fact that people are denying it.

Was there anything there that hasn't been seen on MN in some form?

And yet people on here will say that no one supports Hamas.

has hasretz being promoting fake propaganda against nenthayu over this war ?
jusr seen this and whilst it agrees with some of the atrocities, it also declines some others

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1731302039378882594

Ps. i don’t have access myself to this newspaper so can’t verify it

We'd really need to see a link. I googled but I can't find any matching news articles.

I believe it’s in the tweet I linked

https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-12-03/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018c-2036-d21c-abae-76be08fe0000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share

@EasterIssland I can't read that nor find that article online.

The article is paywalled so I can't see which atrocities they are claiming never happened.
We are all well aware now of how many did in fact happen, as acknowledged by the intro, as well as the belatedly acknowledged extreme sexual violence, so I'm not entirely clear on the motive for posting this.

I would have thought that we were all aware of the amount of babies and children killed in Gaza over the last 2 months yet you still posted a fake story about a dead baby being a doll. Even when you knew it was fake you didn't correct a poster who was insisting that it was real because she had seen that baby before apparently. What was your motive for posting that I wonder?

I don’t have access to hareetz so wanted to check whether what this tweet says is what hareetz is saying. I know in the past few mners have been able to read this newspaper

also, I do believe it’s important to know what happened 7-10 and mourn those who died instead of focusing on those that are fake news (according to this tweet- news).
I know I’ve linked in the past some things that have been proven to be wrong and I’ve requested those to be removed from mn. So I’d like to know whether some of the stories we know from 7-10 did really happen or they were fake news.

im just surprised that this is would come from an Israel newspaper and doubt they’d make it up just to attack the government (as said I don’t have access to this newspaper but some mn in the past have been able to read and verify things).

not sure why you’re mentioning sexual violence when myself and the tweet I link doesn’t mention it.

@OuiOuiKitty I asked for it to be deleted when I realised it wasn't necessarily true - I try to be careful of my sources and as this one had been in the MSM (Jerusalem Post), I posted it. They have since retracted.
I didn't see another poster saying that.

I don't think you have a leg to stand on though given that you're mostly on threads where people are posting posting screeds and screeds of completely unverified instagram and tiktok, and Electronic Intifada links. I at least have the intellectual honesty correct any errors I've made, not double down.