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The October 7 Industry
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The October 7 Industry
The Israeli government exploits tragedy for its own political agenda.
(Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
A company called Show Faith by Works, based in California, has registered under FARA to execute the “largest Geofencing and targeted Christian Digital Campaign ever.” Funded by the Israeli government, the project will send what it calls a mobile “October 7th Experience” across the country, strapping thousands of American Christians into VR goggles to relive the Israeli rendition of Hamas’s attack.
As part of the Israeli government sponsored geofencing and hasbara campaign, the Pro-Israel group will target “every major church” not just in California but in Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado as well as “all Christian colleges” during worship hours; their FARA forms outline a plan to target millions of Christians in the United States. The outreach initiative debuts on the two-year anniversary of October 7.
Americans who miss the Israeli government–sponsored VR tour can have the same “October 7 experience” by turning on the new Hollywood dramatization of the Hamas attack, streaming on the media conglomerate Paramount+ owned by David Ellison, son of the pro-Israel tycoon Larry Ellison. It’s hardly the only one; October 7 films are now so numerous on Apple TV, Amazon, and other platforms that the Jerusalem Post recently declared, “the tragedy of Oct. 7 has become its own cinematic sub-genre.”
New legislation in congress would further cement the Israeli government’s October 7 narrative into American mass consciousness. Congress will soon consider a bill from Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) to require “October 7th Remembrance Curriculum” in public schools. The October 7th Remembrance Education Act “will instruct the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to build a model curriculum for schools to teach the heinous and brutal attacks committed on October 7th, the history of antisemitism and how it played a role in the attacks.” “Denial and distortion” of the Israeli government’s official October 7 claims are “a form of antisemitism,” reads Gottheimer’s press release for the legislation.
But even as Americans are spoonfed the state narrative about October 7, Israelis themselves continue to question their own government’s official story.
Families of those killed or taken hostage have demanded a state inquiry, accusing the Netanyahu government of burying critical evidence and suppressing testimony. Haaretz and Channel 12 have published reports detailing how the Hannibal Directive—a standing order authorizing soldiers to kill Israeli citizens in certain contexts—was invoked across the south on October 7. Footage, survivor accounts, and IDF testimony suggest that many of the burned cars and destroyed homes Israel attributed to Hamas were in fact destroyed by Israeli helicopter and tank fire. Even stranger, Israeli soldiers report receiving unusual orders to stand down on the morning of October 7, allowing the Hamas attack to unfold.
It is unclear why Israeli soldiers were told to abandon their posts, or how many of the 1,200 victims were killed by Israel rather than Hamas. Few in Western corporate media have shown any interest in finding out; the Washington Post interviewed “experts” who labeled such lines of questioning “conspiracy theories.” Questioning the official Israeli government narrative around October 7 is “worrisome to Jewish leaders and researchers who see ties to Holocaust denial.”
In place of journalistic inquiry and skepticism, Western corporate media outlets have helped to launder many of Israel’s most sensationalistic and provocative hoaxes about what happened that day. The source for thoroughly debunked claims of “beheaded babies”—the Israeli first responders group United Hatzalah and its founder Eli Beer—appeared on CNN’s Jake Tapper to describe “the mutilations, the burnings, the beheaded corpses.”
Then, in November, 2023 Dr. Chen Kugel, Israel’s chief forensic pathologist at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute who performed autopsies on October 7 victims, told the Economist that he had seen “the burnt headless bodies of babies.” Joe Biden, frequently repeated the same claim.
But Haaretz reported in December 2023 that no babies were beheaded and no babies were burned alive. As the Israeli newspaper explained, “on October 7 one [emphasis added] baby was murdered, 10-month old Mila Cohen.”
That is not to say that babies have not been beheaded and burned alive in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They have. But those victims have not been Israeli babies but Palestinian ones. In 2015, Israeli settlers firebombed a Palestinian home in the occupied West bank village of Duma, burning alive Saad and Riham Dawabsha and their 18-month-old son Ali. A few months later, Israel’s Channel 10 revealed how Orthodox Jewish Israelis celebrated the Palestinian baby’s murder, airing videos of Israeli youth dancing with guns and knives, with some stabbing pictures of the deceased 18-month old baby. More recently a Palestinian baby was beheaded by one of Israel’s numerous airstrikes on the UNRWA clinic at the Jabalia refugee camp, though that incident barely registered in the Western corporate press.
The effects of the dogmatic narrative are pervasive at the highest levels of American government. When asked last month why he had done nothing to force Israel to end its bombing of Gaza, Trump explained it was because he “had seen the tapes of babies chopped up to pieces,” on October 7. Steve Witkoff, who recently told Tucker Carlson that he had seen similar “tapes” of “beheadings,” and “mass rapes,” explained how watching those Israeli government produced videos “can taint the way you are going to feel about” Palestinians.
“That film is a reality and we cannot ignore the reality of what happened on October 7,” said the United States’ senior negotiator in the Middle East.
That the Israeli government’s own manufactured, emotionally manipulative imagery not only saturates corporate media and Hollywood, but guides the decisions of our president and his peace negotiators should be concerning. But this is the power and legacy of the October 7 industry: the loose network of politicians, Zionist billionaires, lobby groups, and media outlets that have transformed a single day’s violence into a permanent instrument for Israeli power. The October 7 industry exploits Jewish suffering to deflect criticism of Israel, justify its wars, and silence its critics. The phrase “the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust” has become central, lifting Israel’s actions above moral or political scrutiny and into the realm of myth.
As the neoconservative blogger Douglas Murray explained, “In fact, two wars have been raging over the past two years, the first is the war that the state of Israel has been fighting against its enemies, including Iran and its proxies in the region. The second is the war that has been fought against Jews in the wider West.” To “stand with Israel,” then, is not to support a state engaged in a campaign of mass murder; it is to join the righteous in a civilizational struggle between good and evil, as Murray’s colleague at the Free Press, Coleman Hughes, recently put it.
In response to this supposed resurgence of antisemitism after October 7, a coalition of billionaires, media conglomerates, and Israeli government–funded NGOs mobilized to wage that civilizational battle on Israel’s behalf, organizing blacklist campaigns, congressional hearings, and censorship initiatives targeting Israel’s domestic critics in the United States.
The Israeli government boosted its own cyber-surveillance nonprofits, like CyberWell, who, on their website, describe October 7 as the origin point of a new “digital pogrom,” in which social media platforms became “tools for the algorithmic spread of antisemitic content.” Through new content moderation partnerships forged with social media companies, CyberWell is able to fight back against that “pogrom” and censor the free speech of Americans whom they arbitrarily determine contribute toward it.
CyberWell itself is part of a government effort that dates back to at least 2017, when the Ministry of Strategic Affairs launched Concert, an Israeli government–funded group established to “engage in mass consciousness activities,” and lobby for “anti-BDS” legislations across American states, laws which penalize Americans for using their free speech to engage in boycotts of Israel. After October 7, Israeli Diaspora Minister introduced in the Knesset his plans for his own foreign influence operation “to be done in the ‘Concert’ way,” referencing the program Israel had previously funded to censor Americans.
In January 2024, CyberWell reported that it had pressured social-media platforms to censor accounts that disputed the false allegation that Hamas had slaughtered dozens of babies on October 7. Posts questioning those claims, CyberWell declared, were “content denying or distorting the Holocaust.” By collapsing skepticism of Israeli propaganda into Holocaust denial, CyberWell deputized American social-media companies to enforce Israel’s foreign speech codes against U.S. citizens. Social media content that questions unproven claims of “mass rapes” or reference Israel’s deployment of the Hannibal Directive against its own citizens on October 7 are among the more than 300,000 posts the Israeli NGO has successfully removed from the internet.
In addition to social media platforms, perhaps the primary target of the October 7 industry has been American college campuses, which Israel loyalists frame as the epicenter of a global antisemitism epidemic that emerged in response to the Hamas attack. As college students launched protests against Israel’s nascent total assault on Palestinian life in Gaza, billionaires like Bill Ackman organized blacklist campaigns to shut them down. Prestigious law firms rescinded job offers to participants in protests against U.S. taxpayer funding of Israel’s wars; Sullivan and Cromwell announced a policy to screen all job applicants for their potential anti-Israel views.
Ackman is only one of numerous pro-Israel billionaires who form the backbone of the October 7 industry. Another is Paul Singer, founder of the hedge fund Elliot Management, whose Foundation exists to support “the future of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” among its primary causes. Beneficiaries of Singer’s vast fortune include the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, the regime-change–cheerleading think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
One of Singer’s various pro-Israel investments is the conservative media outlet the Washington Free Beacon, which publishes lists of college students who criticize Singer’s favorite foreign government. Most recently, the Free Beacon did the courageous work of exposing “university administrators” who have failed to confront what they call “the faces of evil.” Who are those faces of evil, according to the Free Beacon? “Students on elite college campuses” who “are planning to commemorate the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust with protests against Israel.”
Then there’s Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son David, who together now own TikTok—one of the many apps that partners with CyberWell to censor pro-Palestinian content—and who recently purchased CBS/Paramount, installing Bari Weiss as its editor-in-chief for the expressed purpose of giving that network a more reliable pro-Israel bent.
As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt documented in The Israel Lobby, those efforts are over two decades old. The effort to condition federal Title VI funding to universities based on the political speech of their students and faculty, though implemented only this year under the Trump administration, was the brainchild of neocons Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Stanley Kurtz, who advocated for the International Studies in Higher Education Act in 2004 to do exactly that. Chief among those Israel loyalists’ grievances was the ideological makeup of regional studies departments at Ivy League universities, which Kramer and Kurtz argued were biased and fostered “anti-American,” and “anti-Israel” attitudes. Though the lobby’s efforts to reorient university campuses failed then, by exploiting the narrative of October 7 and resurgent antisemitism, the October 7 industry effectively used the infrastructure of the lobby’s previous attempt to carry it through to its finish line in 2025.
Israel’s pre-October 7 campaign to reshape discourse on American campuses reflects a deeper calculation Israelis have understood for years: that its perpetual occupation and regional wars have rendered it morally indefensible to Western populations. Yet that foreign government depends on the support of Western democracies for its own survival. By exploiting Jewish suffering, the October 7 industry will bolster the cause where the Israel lobby has faltered.
The post The October 7 Industry appeared first on The American Conservative.
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