Manufacturing Consent for Genocide : How October 7th Lies Paved The Way To The Genocide In Gaza

Atrocity propaganda around October 7th Brainwashed people into supporting the indefensible.

Today marked the anniversary of the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas members from Gaza. While there is no doubt there were atrocities committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas militants, the events continue to be one of the most-lied about and misunderstood events in recent history. As if the real atrocity were not bad enough the Israeli government and mainstream media have spun a series of Iraq W.M.D. level lies about what happened on October 7th to manufacture consent for the Western-backed genocidal war in Gaza conducted by Israel. In this article, I will cover the context ignored by the mainstream media and debunk the atrocity propaganda that has been used to justify some of the worst real atrocities in recent history.

What Led to October 7th?

The Western mainstream press loves to pretend that the history of Gaza and Israel began on October 7th but in reality, there are years of history that led to the October 7th attacks.

In 2006 Gaza had elections where they democratically elected a Hamas-led government. After Hamas was elected the George Bush administration armed members of the rival Fatah party in a coup attempt against Hamas. After the Bush administration armed members of Fatah in Egypt it led to fighting between Fatah and Hamas which Hamas eventually won.

When this fighting was going on Israel admitted they wanted Hamas to win because they could use it to place a brutal blockade on Gaza. A Wikileaks cable showed that the Israeli director of Military Intelligence Amos Yadlin said he would “be happy” if Hamas won because it would allow Israel to “declare Gaza as a hostile entity” and enact a brutal blockade.

When Israel did place the blockade on Gaza, Israeli advisor to the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert admitted its purpose was to “put the Palestinians on a diet”. The Blockade stopped any Palestinians in Gaza from leaving the strip even by Boat and led to the blocking of essential food and medicine as well as raising the unemployment level in Gaza from 18 to 40 percent. The blockade was so brutal that even former UK Prime Minister David Cameron admitted it turned Gaza into “a prison camp” and “an open-air prison”.

Israel also brought forward a series of “peace proposals” that they knew would not be accepted by Palestinians in Gaza in order to perpetuate the idea that it was the Palestinians that did not want peace and therefore justify the blockade. A 2010 intelligence assessment from Stratfor - a Texas-based intelligence company that does intelligence reports for companies like Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon and agencies like the DHS and DIA found that- “While Israel has agreed to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians, it seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians' unwillingness to meet those demands”.The assessment goes on to note that the reason for this was because Israel was “counting on the Palestinians and the international community to fail in its attempts to carry out the proposal” so that it could “reassume the position (the blockade on Gaza) it abandoned due to U.S. pressure.”

Israel also did everything it could to stop any resistance- violent or nonviolent- to the blockade from Palestinians in Gaza by periodically killing civilians in Gaza a strategy they disgustingly called “mowing the grass”.

The final nail in the coffin was when Israel enacted a strategy to get the Arab world to abandon the Palestinian cause by putting forward a supposed “peace proposal” called the “Abraham Accords”. The Accords were led by Netenyahu and Donald Trump who used Jared Kushner as their intermediary. The deal allowed Israel to normalize with Morocco, UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan and was on its way to normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. As Vox reported, the point of the deal was to get Arab nations to “let their support for the Palestinians slip and side a little closer with the Israelis”. As the New Yorker’s David Remnik put it the deal led to “sidelining the Palestinians yet again”

By the time October 7th came around Israel had placed the genocidal blockade on Gaza for years and would do anything including deceptively proposing “peace deals” they knew would fail in order to justify it. Whether Palestinians in Gaza resisted the blockade with force such as in 2014 or peacefully like in 2018 the result was a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israel. The world was ignoring the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and Israel even got Arab States that previously supported the Palestinian cause to side with them through the Abraham Accords. This level of desperation is what led to the Hamas attacks on October 7th which they called Operation Al Aqsa Flood. This context is almost always left out of mainstream media reports which act like Hamas just started killing Israelis for fun instead of giving this context as to what actually led to the attacks.

How Many Israeli Civilians Did Hamas Really Kill?

If you read mainstream Western media, you would come away with the idea that Hamas killed 1400 Israeli civilians on October 7th but this is far from the truth. As journalist Asa Winstanley reported in the Electronic Intifada, 200 people in this initial count turned out to be Hamas fighters bringing the number down to 1200. The official death count has now been lowered to 1154. Of those deaths, 374 were combatants lowering the number of civilians killed down to 780.

Furthermore, of those remaining 780 civilians, it is now undeniable that at least some of them were actually killed by Israel. It is now undeniable that Israel issued the Hannibal directive on October 7th, an Israeli military doctrine that calls for the IDF to kill their own civilians to prevent them from becoming hostages. A report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the IDF ordered this doctrine as early as 7:18 Am at the Erez border crossing giving an order saying “Hannibal at Erez". The report also revealed that the doctrine was ordered again at Erez at 7:41 A.M as well as at the Kibbutz Be'eri and the Nahal Oz outpost. It also showed that the order was given “to turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone” and that Israeli soldiers were told “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” even though “Everyone knew by then that such vehicles could be carrying kidnapped civilians or soldiers”.

A separate article in the Australian state-funded outlet ABC shed more light on the story, quoting Israeli Air Force Colonel Nof Erez who said a “mass Hannibal” was conducted on October 7th and that the Israeli military fired on “thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without”. The article also quoted an Israeli air force pilot who said that “Twenty-eight fighter helicopters shot over the course of the day all of the ammunition in their bellies” and only after this did they “lower their attacks and carefully choose the targets”. As Asa Winstanley noted in the above-mentioned Electronic Intifada article “It is unknown how many Israelis those 70 vehicles contained, but given what is known about other incidents, some cars probably contained several.” meaning that “the 1,000 targets hit could have easily resulted in hundreds of dead people.”.

We still do not know exactly how many Israeli civilians were killed by their own government using the Hannibal Directive but the reporting on the instances points to the fact that it was certainly many.

The Made-Up Burned, Beheaded, and Murdered Babies

Israel’s social security agency Bituach Leumi, has documented all of the civilians who were killed on October 7th. One infant was killed, a 10-month-old named Mila Cohen who was caught in between gunfire at the Kibbutz Beeri. While this is obviously a horrific tragedy it is the only documented instance of an infant being killed on October 7th. This means that all the other claims of murdered babies on October 7th were fabricated in order to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza.

The Israeli government and Western mainstream media repeated a fabricated claim that “40 beheaded babies” were found at Kfar Aza kibbutz, something that has now been proven to be false.

They also claimed that babies were “burned alive” on October 7th, something that is proven false by the fact that the only infant killed on October 7th was not burned alive.

In his speech to Congress Netenyahu concocted a story about “two babies” being murdered “in a secret attic” despite the fact that this false story is also contradicted by the documentation of civilians killed on October 7th.

Some of the most absurd lies spread about October 7th were ridiculous claims that Hamas burned a baby in an oven and ripped an unborn fetus out of a pregnant woman's stomach and killed it. Aside from the fact that these ridiculous stories seem like something out of a low-budget Horror movie, they are again contradicted by the actual documentation of civilians killed on October 7th.

Most of these false claims came from “Zaka” an ultra-religious rescue organization with no forensic experience that has been known to spread false claims. Instead of sending rescuers with forensic experience, Israeli sent Zaka members to be the first responders on October 7th likely because they knew they would fabricate outrageous claims such as that 40 babies were beheaded.

The Mass Rape Hoax

After the claims of beheaded and burned babies were revealed as a Hoax, Israel needed a new deception to justify their genocide in Gaza. This is where the mass rape hoax was introduced. In his recent documentary “Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells Its Destruction Of Gaza” journalist Max Blumenthal revealed that after 70 percent of Democrats supported a ceasefire in Gaza when polled, Israel hired celebrity pollster Frank Luntz to conduct focus groups on messaging about Gaza and show the results to influential lawmakers and influencers. The polls done by Luntz showed that people were most upset over claims about rape occurring on October 7th than any other atrocity allegation.

This is when the mass rape hoax went into full swing. The New York Times published their infamous article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” which was later disproven when a spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri revealed that two people listed in the article as victims of sexual assault were in fact not. Another woman listed as a victim, Gal Abdush had her family members come out to say that in fact she was not raped by Hamas members as the New York Times has claimed.

Max Blumenthal documented in the aforementioned documentary that a follow-up documentary was put out by Sheryl Sandberg called “Screams before Silence” that used supposed “confession” videos of Hamas members confessing to sexual assault despite the fact that they were clearly under duress and were coerced to make these “confessions” through torture by the Israeli state. The U.S. government also released these same “confession” videos despite the fact that multiple human rights groups and the UN concluded that they were extracted under torture.

The narrative was finally fully disproven by a thorough investigation by the Time of London newspaper that found that the Mass rape claims originated with the aforementioned “Zaka” group, the discredited, ultra-religious rescue groups whose claims of mass rape “cleaved to stories handed down about the horrors of the pogroms” and the stories were conducted by them because “read a lot of Jewish texts that depict the raping of women.” and because in Jewish religious scripture these stories “reappear every time there is a major event against Jewish communities.

In other words, the entire Western mainstream media and governments are to this day repeating a claim that originated from a bunch of ultra-orthodox lunatics who made it up based on religious scripture.

Even more damning, the investigation found that there is not a single piece of video or photographic evidence that rape occurred at all on October 7th. The article states that “In all the Hamas video footage and all the photographs there were no depictions of rape, We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.” As many know most of the violence committed by Hamas on October 7th was filmed by Hamas members, if “mass rape” had occurred it certainly would have shown up in some of the videos.

The Ignored Ceasefire Proposal

The final important context left out of mainstream media reports about October 7th is that Israel could have gotten all their hostages back had they agreed to a ceasefire after October 7th but decided to conduct their genocidal war in Gaza instead. Former Israeli spokesman Haim Rubinstein revealed to the Times of Israel that “Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer”. Zionists often justify the genocidal war in Gaza by pretending that it is about retrieving hostages, but the reality is they could have had all their hostages back but chose genocide instead.

A Case Study in Manufacturing Consent

The lies about October 7th are the perfect case study to demonstrate how atrocity propaganda can manipulate people into supporting real atrocities. Over-exaggerated claims of civilians killed on October 7th have led to people supporting tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza. False claims of beheaded and burned babies have led people to support the killing of over 10 thousand children in Gaza. Evidence-free claims of mass rape on October 7th have led people to support documented rape of Palestinian detainees by Isreali soldiers. The lies about October 7th are an important lesson in how false atrocity propaganda is used to justify horrific atrocities that most would ordinally find repulsive. It is important for people to learn not to fall for this psychologically manipulative technique.