October 7 - the Weaponisation of Western Trauma

It’s October 7 in New Zealand today. The first anniversary of “the deadliest day in Israel’s history”, the “worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust”¹. While there’s not a lot in New Zealand media so far today - though I did just spot yet another condemnation of Hamas from our Foreign Minister Winston Peters. I suspect we’re about to be inundated with a tsunami of memoralising once the date clicks over in the Northern Hemisphere.

Not only will we get the inevitable cries for vengeance from Israeli politicians we’ll also have to put up with heartfelt pontifications from politicians and government spokespeople all over the Western world. We may even get some more tears from that soft-hearted old bastard Admiral John Kirby. He cried openly on air while talking to Jake Sullivan about the October 7 attack but he’s never seemed able to squeeze out any tears for the thousands of Palestinians who have died since then.

We’ll hear – as we have heard many times before – testimonies from survivors and their loved ones. We’ll hear – again – about the hostages in Gaza, hostages who could have been home months ago if not for Israel’s desire to raze Gaza to the ground and wage a genocidal war upon its inhabitants.  We’ll see – again – hazy go-pro images of Hamas fighters and photos of destroyed Kibbutzim and people fleeing in terror from the Nova Rave. We’ll get the approved story of the events of October 7 recounted in breathless tones laced with emotion-laden words such as ‘barbaric’ and ‘slaughter’ and ‘murder’ and ‘terrorist’.

There’ll be no mention of the Hannibal Directive. There’ll be no mention that Israel killed many – some even say most – of the people who died that day. There’ll be no mention of the contested nature of the testimonies from eye-witnesses and first responders. Emotion and the very real pain of those caught up in the events of October 7 will be in the foreground.

If Gaza is mentioned at all in such memorialising it will most likely be a side note. Israel’s assault on Gaza is still seen by most Western politicians and the vast majority of the media as the inevitable, if somewhat regrettable, response to the horrors of October 7. Perhaps that response has been a little over the top, some might say. Perhaps there have been a “few too many civilian deaths” but Palestinian death doesn’t carry the same emotional charge as Israeli death so … ‘meh’. At the most we might get numbers of the dead - now permanently frozen at 40,000 - but no emotion, no real human pain.

And perhaps most importantly of all, there will probably be very little mention of any context. Because, in common with September 11, that other relatively recent horrific attack perpetrated on Westerners, October 7 happened “out of the blue”. Both these events occurred because ‘they’ - the brown-skinned barbaric ‘other’ - are full of hatred for ‘us’, the ‘civilised Westerners’. September 11 happened because they hate us for our freedom. October 7 happened because they hate us for being Jewish. Everything that happened after these two events happened because of them but nothing that happened before them could ever justify, or even explain, them. In fact even suggesting that such horrific acts of barbarism could be explained - let alone justified - could get you ejected from polite society, thrown out of your patriotic Uncle’s house, fired from your job, ejected from your university, doxxed on social media, arrested at an airport, thrown in jail for ‘supporting terrorism’ …

Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely not saying October 7 shouldn’t be memorialised. It is, after all, the first anniversary of a tragic and traumatic event in which many people died and many others were taken hostage. For those involved and for their loved ones it was, and remains, a terrible trauma, a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Those who died deserve to be remembered, their loved ones deserve to mourn in whatever way they choose. Those taken hostage deserve recognition and remembrance.

But as Naomi Klein asks in a recent article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper

what is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?

As Naomi Klein further notes

One of the most remarkable aspects of the response to 7 October inside Israel and much of the Jewish diaspora was the speed with which it was absorbed into what is now called “memory culture”: the artistic, technological and architectural methodologies that transform collective traumas into educational experiences for others, usually in the name of human rights, peace, and against the scourge of denial or the oblivion of forgetting. For mass atrocities, it usually takes decades before a society is ready to reckon with the past honestly. Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary about the Holocaust, Shoah, for instance, came out 40 years after the end of the second world war.

If the last year is anything to go by what we will be exposed to over the next few days will involve a lot more than just memorialising because, like September 11 before it, October 7 has now entered the realm of Western myth.

As Michael Woods of PBS points out myths are “sacred tales that explain the world and the human experience”, they’re tales that “answer timeless questions and serve as a compass to each generation”. Myths help members of a culture to understand and, most importantly, to justify, the actions taken by their group. As noted in UEN’s ‘Mythology Unbound’ “historical myths are [re-tellings of] a historical event, and they help keep the memory of that event alive. Ironically, in historical myths”, the author goes on to note “the accuracy is lost but meaning is gained”.

And the meaning of both September 11 and October 7 are crystal clear to all of us here in the West. They were events which brought to vivid life the oft-invoked threat of the racialised, demonised other. They were events which ‘proved’ to us that that ‘other’, the brown-skinned ‘Islamic terrorists’ who looked forward to enjoying the hospitality of 40 virgins upon their martyrdom, had us all, man, woman and child, always, in their sights. Both events showed us that the hatred these ‘terrorists’ felt for us - democratic, tolerant, respectful of human rights and diversity and entirely innocent though we all are - was implacable and terrifying. It impressed upon us that such an enemy must be met with a ferocity equal to his own. In short, both events gave our leaders the opportunity to open the gates of hell.

The purpose of constantly telling and re-telling the events of September 11 and October 7 is not just to memorialise them but to provide an explanation and, most importantly, a justification for all the horrors wrought upon those judged to carry the full responsibility for those events. In the case of September 11 the horrors of that day were invoked and reinvoked on an endless loop on every TV station, in every newspaper - not just in America but across the entire Western world. Stories of the brave first responders were told and re-told. Recordings of last messages from those aboard the aircraft and from those trapped in the towers were played and re-played. And the mis-steps and outright malfeasance on the part of the U.S. government that allowed the attacks to occur were never, ever mentioned.

Image Credit: Still from Eyewitness to 9/11: Behind the Lens | Original News Coverage - WABC-TV Eyewitness News

Image Credit: Wall Street Journal

Alongside the horrific imagery of that day - the planes flying into the iconic World Trade Centre, people jumping to their deaths from the burning buildings, the towers collapsing in a heap of smoking rubble - Americans were informed that their country was ‘under attack’ by a vicious foe - ‘Muslim terrorists’ - evil men who hate us for our ‘freedom’. Men so deranged they’d happily go to their deaths just for the joy of killing us. It didn’t take long before the American population was whipped into a frenzy of hatred and fear under cover of which the U.S. government embarked upon a series of invasions they called ‘The War on Terror’. This ‘war’ which ultimately claimed millions of lives both directly, via bombardment and invasion, and indirectly, via brutal sanctions. But they were brown lives so they didn’t matter. After all, we told ourselves, they don’t feel the same about life as we do. They’re different from us.

Image - Wall Street Journal

Just like September 11, the horrors of October 7 have also been invoked and re-invoked in the same sort of endless loop, but in this case with significant embellishments that later turned out to be entirely false. Such embellishments weren’t necessary for September 11 because the footage from that day was electrifying enough to do the job of terrifying and enraging everyone who saw it. October 7, however, was a relatively small attack on several Kibbutzim and a music festival by a group of lightly armed fighters. That is not to say it wasn’t utterly horrifying for those caught up in it but it was not quite existentially horrifying enough to really put the wind up those sitting in their armchairs at home without a little bit of extra spice added after the fact. This ‘extra spice’ transformed October 7 from a traumatic event that happened to a relatively small group of people in a small Middle Eastern country called Israel into an event of supreme barbarity, perpetrated by men so depraved, so utterly evil, they could barely be seen as human. The extra spice transformed October 7 into an event so horrifying that no response to it could possibly be harsh enough.

That response, of course, was the attack on Gaza, an attack that the International Court of Justice judged, way back in January of this year, to be ‘plausibly’ a genocide. That response - framed by Israel and the entire Western political and media class as the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ - has since spread to the West Bank and now to Lebanon and Syria. As I write Israel is threatening Iran - a country Netanyahu and his ally the United States have long had in their sights. And for the entire year that Israel has been exacting its terrible retribution for the events of October 7 not just Israelis but everyone in the West has been regaled with wave upon wave of eye-wateringly terrifying stories about that day.

The first wave of stories about October 7 included lurid tales of babies roasted in ovens, babies with their throats cut and, of course, the now notorious 40 beheaded babies story. All of these baby stories were reported, with little to no scepticism, by most major Western media outlets. All of these stories were - relatively quickly - found to be untrue. Only one baby, Mila Cohen, died on October 7. All the other babies were made up babies, babies conjured up out of the fevered imaginations of Israeli first responders - including members of the notorious ZAKA group - and other Israeli officials.

Image: Screenshot from LBC - this story is still up on LBC’s website

Image Credit - Screenshot, Fox News. This story is still up on the site.

Image: Screenshot from a Le Monde investigation into the beheaded babies claim

Shamefully even President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken got in on the myth-making action - which, of course, lent a huge helping of extra gravitas to the tales. Antony Blinken repeated a particularly lurid tale about about a family of four totured and killed at their breakfast table at what looks, from the video, to be an Appropriations Committee hearing. In Antony’s words:

The father had his eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off. The girl’s foot amputated. The boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed. And their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.

This story turned out to be a direct testimony from a member of ZAKA and has since been revealed, like all the other ZAKA stories, to be a total fabrication. To my knowledge Blinken has yet to apologise for uncritically parroting these lies; lies which are still circulating amongst the American public. Lies which help to foment an impression of Hamas - and of the Palestinian people who elected Hamas as their government, as Israel supporters never tire of telling us - as irredeemably evil.

And then Joe Biden, at a White House Press Conference not long after October 7, said: “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children”. Of course Biden could not have seen such pictures because no such pictures have ever existed. And indeed, as reported by Al Jazeera, the White House was later forced to “walk back Biden’s claim”. The damage, however, was well and truly done. Far more people heard the original claim, made by the President of the United States, than ever heard the later ‘walking back’ of it.

Image: Screenshot from BBC. This story is still up on the BBC website.

The next wave of embellishments on the events of October 7 occurred in early December, 2023 with the breaking of the ‘Hamas weaponised mass rape’ story. The first appearance of this, to my knowledge, was a story by the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent, Lucy Williamson on December 5th. Other stories followed in quick succession, all repeating the same tales from the same sources and often quoting directly or indirectly from each other. There was another particularly lurid re-telling from Bethan McKernan of The Guardian who, alone amongst legacy media journalists, used testimony extracted via torture to make her case that Hamas weaponised mass rape on October 7. Then on December 28 - while the International Court of Justice was deliberating on the genocide case taken against Israel by South Africa - the Mother of All Mass Rape Stories broke; the New York Times’ now notorious ‘Screams Without Words’.

The allegations made in this article were - like the burned, beheaded and mutilated babies - debunked by numerous outlets as I outline, at length, in an earlier post here. Suffice to say that journalistic malpractice is an altogether too kind way to describe the egregiousness of this article.

As pointed out by The Intercept, despite many of the October 7 atrocity stories being debunked by the Israelis themselves, American media kept repeating them regardless. No Western news outlet has, to my knowledge, published any major mea culpas for publishing any of these bogus stories - indeed, many of them remain up on their websites - including the New York Times ‘Screams Without Words’. The reason for this, of course, is that the war being waged by Israel is as much an American war as it is an Israeli war (more on this in my next post) and thus it became particularly important to make sure that the American public was fully on board with it. The grisly fates of the various imaginary babies, and the blood-curdling horrors of the imaginary strategically planned Hamas mass rapes with their breasts being used as footballs and their victims with the ‘faces of angels’ were simply too useful to the October 7 mythos to be easily let go of.

And so, naturally enough, many people still fervently believe these stories are true - as evidenced by impassioned outbursts by Zionists confronting anti-genocide protesters and by the colourful responses of Israel supporters on Twitter / X to pro-Palestinian posts.

And so October 7 enters the hallowed halls of events that are so evil that merely invoking their name sends shivers down every Westerner’s spine. Only a few events are allowed into those halls - I’ve already mentioned one of them, September 11. The other is, of course, the Holocaust. All three of these events have been taken outside the realm of traumas that happened to a certain group of people at a certain time and turned into collective traumas that - via repeated attempts to graphically re-create them as mediated experiences - continue to traumatise not just the victims but also thousands of people who only ever encounter them via these mediated experiences.

As Naomi Klein points out, in the case of October 7, even before the one-year mark,

there was already an off-Broadway “verbatim play”, called October 7, drawn from witness testimony; several art exhibitions, and at least two 7 October-themed fashion shows, one of which saw models who had survived the attacks or lost loved ones adorn themselves with prosthetic wounds, fake blood and dresses made of shell casings.

There are also, already, several 7 October films. The first one was the IDF’s ‘Bearing Witness’ - a video compilation of the most horrific moments of the day. Klein notes that

within weeks of the attacks, it was being screened to curated audiences of politicians, business leaders and journalists everywhere from Davos to the Museum of Tolerance in LA.

Next came several more professional documentaries, including the cinematic twin of the New York Times’ ‘Screams Without Words’ - Screams Before Silence - a documentary about the alleged sexual violence on October 7, fronted by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg. Then were was #Nova - a compilation of video and audio clips from surviving festival goers which, in the words of its creators “chronicles the harrowing atrocities minute by minute” revealing “the true, bone-chilling atrocities of October 7th”. After reading that blurb you’re left in no doubt that there were definitely a lot of atrocities that day. Most recently there was the BBC’s Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again.

Here are just a few reactions to this documentary from supporters of Israel on X / Twitter.

As Naomi Klein points out the primary goal of these recreations of the trauma of October 7

seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.

Klein goes on to note that there is a difference between understanding an event intellectually and feeling like you are personally living through it.

The latter produces not understanding but what Sodaro has called a “prosthetic trauma”, which, she writes, is highly conducive to “a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications. Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction. Vision is narrowed, tunneled.

These re-imaginings of October 7 help to perpetuate, in Klein’s words

a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.

And that, of course, is very much the point of all the October 7 ‘memorialising’. Amidst the constant re-playing of the ‘harrowing atrocities’ of October 7, atrocities that happened to people ‘just like us’, ‘real people’ with ‘real feelings’ - so we tell ourselves - it’s all too easy for us narcissistic, self-involved Westerners to entirely lose sight of the fact that October 7 was, in actuality, just one day whereas the retribution that Israel is exacting for that one day has gone on for over 360 days.

Over 360 days of of bombings, shootings by sniper, bombings by AI programmed drones that wait until you’re at home before going off - killing not just you but your whole family, amputations and Cesarean sections without anaesthetic, executions, torture, mass graves, being buried alive under rubble, burning to death, starving to death. Over 360 days of children with bullet holes in their heads, children with their brains blown out, children in pieces scattered all over a schoolyard which should be a place of learning and fun but is now a place of dislocation, loss, grief and terror.

So many of us in the West have fallen victim to what is - quite simply - a callous and cynical weaponisation of trauma in service of the agendas of power. So brace yourself for tomorrow - in fact, as I write this tomorrow is nearly today. Brace yourself for the tsunami of grief, for the performative posturing of the politicians, for the screaming headlines from the media, for the prosthetic trauma we’ll all be encouraged to experience and re-experience as we are all exhorted to writhe in collective misery over the events of one day. One short day when a small group of Westerners ‘just like us’ were visited with a tiny taste of the kind of terror and brutality our vicious civilisation has visited upon the rest of the world for over 600 years. And as the West gathers together to mourn the events of that one short day tomorrow the bombs will continue to drop on Gaza and on Lebanon and on Syria and the kind of terror that was felt on October 7 will be felt day after day after day by other human beings. Real living, breathing human beings, human beings who love their wives, their husbands, their children. Human beings with hopes and dreams and lives they look forward to living. Human beings who deserve to live in peace, who deserve to be happy.

Human beings just like us.

1. This is, in fact, untrue. There were several thousand Jewish people murdered during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ where, Cosofam maintains, “the military regime enacted "a specific anti-Semitic genocidal plan".

As reported in The Guardian in 1999, “the official figure for disappearances is 10,000, but human rights groups claim the death toll could be as high as 30,000.

"We have identified 1,296 Jewish victims by name out of the official list of 10,000 victims," Mr Jaroslavsky said. "But if the unofficial figure of 30,000 total victims is correct then the number of Jewish victims could be over 3,000."