In a searing op-ed published by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), Lisa Katz, the organization's chief government affairs officer, draws a clear and uncompromising line: denying Hamas' documented atrocities from October 7, 2023, including its systematic use of sexual violence, is not a legitimate form of political expression. It is, she argues, an act of cruelty inflicted directly upon the survivors, the bereaved, and the traumatized communities still living in the shadow of that massacre. The piece, amplified by CAM's official social media channels, arrives at a moment when October 7 denialism has metastasized from fringe conspiracy into a disturbing mainstream rhetorical pattern across social media, campuses, and even some political circles. The stakes could not be higher: how the world chooses to remember and acknowledge October 7 will determine how seriously the international community treats terrorist violence and antisemitic mass murder for decades to come.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement and Its Mission
The Combat Antisemitism Movement is a broad-based, nonpartisan coalition dedicated to combating the global resurgence of antisemitism. Founded with the conviction that fighting Jew-hatred requires a unified front across religious and political communities, CAM has grown into one of the most prominent advocacy organizations addressing antisemitism at the governmental and civil-society level. Lisa Katz, as chief government affairs officer, leads the organization's engagement with legislators, policy makers, and international institutions, making her uniquely positioned to address the legal and political dimensions of Holocaust-adjacent denialism. Her op-ed is not merely a moral appeal — it is a carefully argued policy statement rooted in documented evidence, survivor testimony, and international law.
CAM's intervention on this specific issue reflects a growing institutional awareness that October 7 denialism is not a random or spontaneous phenomenon. It is part of a coordinated effort, advanced by Hamas's ideological allies, Iran-aligned propaganda networks, and useful fellow travelers in Western media, to rewrite the events of that day, protect Hamas from accountability, and ultimately delegitimize Israeli self-defense. When an organization with CAM's reach and credibility labels this behavior as cruelty rather than discourse, it signals a deliberate escalation in the counter-denialism effort.
What Happened on October 7: The Documented Record
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest single-day massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers were murdered, more than 240 were taken hostage into Gaza, and thousands were wounded. The atrocities were not incidental or disputed — Hamas terrorists filmed themselves committing acts of murder, kidnapping, and humiliation and shared those videos with pride. Sexual violence was central to the assault: the United Nations, Israeli law enforcement, and multiple independent investigative bodies have documented rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, and the sexual desecration of murder victims at kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival.
The evidence is overwhelming and multi-sourced. Testimonies from survivors, first responders, forensic investigators, and hostage families; physical and photographic evidence gathered at crime scenes; and self-incriminating Hamas footage collectively establish an incontrovertible factual record. The Anti-Defamation League has documented that denying these atrocities — particularly the sexual violence — represents a willful refusal to extend to Israeli victims the same credibility automatically granted to survivors of sexual violence in any other context worldwide. This double standard is not accidental; it is the product of ideological hostility to Jewish victimhood.
Key Facts on October 7 Denial
- The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict confirmed in March 2024 that there were "reasonable grounds to believe" that sexual violence occurred on October 7, including rape and gang rape at multiple sites — findings derived from first-hand survivor and witness testimony.
- The ADL has catalogued a wide spectrum of October 7 denial tactics, including claims that atrocity evidence was "planted," that Hamas did not commit sexual violence, and that the massacre itself was a "false flag" — with prominent denialists including political scientists, media personalities, foreign government officials, and Islamist-aligned social media networks.
- A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll conducted after October 7 found that the vast majority of Palestinian respondents denied that Hamas committed atrocities against Israeli civilians, illustrating how denial is not merely a Western fringe phenomenon but is actively cultivated as a political narrative by Hamas's support ecosystem.
Why Denial Is a Form of Antisemitism
Lisa Katz's central argument — that denial is cruelty, not discourse — deserves careful unpacking, because it cuts to the heart of a recurring pattern in the history of antisemitism. Jewish suffering has been systematically disbelieved, minimized, and retroactively erased across centuries, from blood libel accusations to Holocaust denial. The specific targeting of October 7 sexual violence for skepticism mirrors the same mechanism: it treats Jewish victims as unworthy of the empathy and evidentiary standards applied to all others. As the Fox News investigation into Israel's ongoing accountability efforts documented, Israeli institutions like Bar-Ilan University's Rackman Center have been forced to build elaborate legal and testimonial infrastructure simply to have the truth accepted — a burden no other victim community would be asked to shoulder.
This asymmetry is the mechanism of antisemitism in action. When pundits casually dismiss documented evidence of Hamas rape as "unverified," they are not engaging in good-faith skepticism — they are participating in a rhetorical tradition that has historically preceded and enabled mass violence against Jewish communities. Naming this pattern clearly, as Katz does, is essential both to honoring the victims and to preventing the normalization of a denial culture that emboldens future atrocities.
The Broader Significance of CAM's Stance
The Combat Antisemitism Movement's decision to frame October 7 denial as an act of cruelty — rather than merely a factual error or political exaggeration — represents an important rhetorical and legal escalation. It signals that civil society organizations are increasingly unwilling to treat denialism as a matter of honest disagreement and are instead positioning it as a form of victim abuse that warrants institutional and potentially legal response. Several Western democracies have already moved to categorize Holocaust denial as a criminal offense; the question of whether equivalent protections should extend to denial of documented contemporary atrocities is now a live policy debate in multiple legislatures.
More fundamentally, how the world responds to October 7 denialism will set a precedent for how democratic societies handle state-sponsored and ideologically motivated disinformation about mass atrocities. If the international community allows a coherent, documented, multi-source evidentiary record to be successfully muddied and discredited by propaganda networks aligned with a designated terrorist organization, it will have surrendered a critical norm: that facts about atrocities can be established and defended. The ADL's comprehensive documentation of October 7 denialism makes plain that this is not a marginal problem — it is a systematic campaign. Lisa Katz and the Combat Antisemitism Movement are right to call it what it is: not politics, but cruelty.