In city council hearings, protests and online, a growing movement with ties to Holocaust denial is effacing history in real-time

When she first heard about Hamas’s 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 the 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’s breach of the border — a strike Israel says left about 1,200 dead, the deadliest 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 hostages Hamas took into Gaza were actually kidnapped by Israel. Some contend the United States is behind the plot.

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