Protesters to Propagandists: Calla Walsh and July Eccles
From youthful activism to atrocity denial and propaganda, the radicalisation of Calla Walsh and Julia Eccles is a warning.
Written By: Robert Khumalo
Five years ago, Calla Walsh was a teenage political prodigy from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved in establishment circles, worked on Democratic campaigns, and was profiled as part of a new generation of savvy, socially conscious activists. Today, she is based in Beirut, embedded in networks aligned with Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” appearing on state media, and chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.
Her journey did not happen overnight. It moved in stages. From mainstream activism to ideological radicalisation. From protest to direct action, including attacks on Israeli-linked facilities that led to arrest and jail time. From there, deeper entanglement - trips to Cuba, relationships with international far-left organisers, and ultimately relocation into the orbit of Iranian state influence and Hezbollah-controlled environments.
A parallel story is unfolding in South Africa.
In June 2018, the SA Jewish Report documented an incident at the FotoZA Gallery in Rosebank Mall. Three young people dressed in black arrived and plastered posters on the gallery’s windows to protest an exhibition showcasing the work of Israeli and South African photographers. They were caught by mall security, handed to police, questioned, and warned. One of those three was Julia Eccles, then 32. When a journalist asked her what Hamas stood for, she replied that Hamas was “a political party and organisation in Palestine that goes around building things like schools.” She added that she had heard Hamas was “propped up by America and Israel, which gave it money.” Ignorance, on its own, is not a crime. People hold uninformed views and change them. What is striking about Eccles is not that she was uninformed in 2018 — it is what happened next. She did not educate herself and revise her position. She became a hardened propagandist. By 2024 she was actively denying the atrocities Hamas committed, dismissing documented accounts of rape survivors as fabrications, and spreading conspiracy theories about Israeli intelligence. The trajectory from 2018 to 2026 is a story of radicalization.
In May 2024, she wrote publicly: “There is no forensic evidence of ‘systematic sexual violence’ on Oct 7th, it simply doesn’t exist. This narrative was all fabricated using emotive, misleading language and it was done by IDF officials and their PR consultants. What ‘victims’ are we supposed to believe when there has not been a single victim, 7 months later? Give me a break.” She paired this with praise for the Electronic Intifada (a publication known for minimizing Hamas atrocities) for a video purporting to debunk Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary on the October 7 mass rapes.
In January 2024, she shared content from an account called @hoaxvstruths framing New York Times reporting on October 7 rape survivors as “propaganda.” When Facebook removed her posts on this subject, she told her followers to screenshot and spread her content to avoid Facebook’s rules. By September 2025, she was sharing content from Richard Medhurst dismissing eyewitness testimony about the October 7 murders as staged by “soldiers and government actors posing as civilians.” That same month, Facebook removed another of her posts entirely.
The oldest antisemitic smear is the blood libel; the accusation that Jews murder, exploit, or abuse non-Jewish children for their own purposes. It drove the pogroms and the Nazi propaganda machine. Eccles has spread modern blood libels in her public posts. In November 2022, responding to an AIPAC post about Israeli medical technology improving American healthcare, she endorsed a comment describing it as “Innovating organ theft.” The organ theft conspiracy, the claim that Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinians, is one of the most widely circulated iterations of the blood libel. It has been repeatedly investigated and debunked. It maps precisely onto the medieval accusation: Jewish hands on the bodies of innocent victims. On February 1, 2026 she posted an image depicting an Israeli tank crushing Palestinian civilians, accompanied by the text: “You can pull the lever to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children, but Mossad will leak footage of you on Epstein Island.” Her caption: “So now that the whole thing has finally been blown wide open, what happens next?” The claim that Israeli intelligence controls Western politicians through child sex trafficking footage is the blood libel in its most contemporary form.
In November 2025, Eccles shared a Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) poster depicting several women as feminist icons. Among them, holding a rifle, is Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker who participated in the 1969 TWA Flight 840 hijacking and the 1970 Dawson’s Field hijackings; operations that targeted Jewish and Israeli civilians. Khaled is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated a terrorist organisation by the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Eccles shared it approvingly, as a vision of the kind of women her party celebrates. Violence against Jewish and Israeli civilians is not a crime to her. It is heroism, provided the perpetrator is on the right side of her ideological ledger.
She takes the extremist view that Israel has never had the right to exist.
Eccles is an organized political operative with multiple institutional roles, a media platform, and a clear ideological agenda. On April 3 2026, she appeared on News Central TV as a WASP representative. In February 2026 she raised funds for the SA BDS Coalition’s anti-imperialist protests, publishing bank details in her own name. In November 2024 she published an opinion piece in the Cape Argus calling Amazon’s cloud contract with Israel “digital genocide” and describing Jeff Bezos as the face of “corporate tyranny.”
Julia Eccles’s record is well documented. She has denied the October 7 rapes. She has called survivors “‘victims’” in scare quotes. She has had content removed by Facebook for violating community standards on multiple occasions. She has endorsed the organ theft blood libel. She has spread the Mossad-Epstein conspiracy theory. She has shared imagery glorifying a terrorist who targeted Jewish civilians. The blood libel does not require a medieval dungeon. It requires only someone willing to wield it, a TikTok video to spread it, and a media ecosystem willing to amplify it before the facts are established.
There is a temptation to dismiss voices like Eccles as fringe. But Walsh was once a teenager posting and organising online. Today, she is cited by intelligence officials as someone embedded in networks connected to sanctioned groups, operating from within regions controlled by them. It remains to be seen where Eccle’s journey ends.
Robert Khumalo is a political analyst and classical liberal commentator.