Category: Arts & Culture

Warren Kinsella has spent much of his career studying the darker corners of political life. A lawyer by training, author of about a dozen books and a longtime political strategist, he has written about Holocaust denial, far-right extremism and organized hate movements. 

In his just-released book, The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, he follows these threads down the unseemly rabbit hole that has perplexed many observers since Oct. 7, 2023: the sudden and superficially spontaneous eruption of anti-Israel activism across Western campuses and cities in the aftermath of the horrendous atrocities of that day.

Kinsella’s thesis is straightforward and, to most readers of these pages, probably neither controversial nor surprising. The worldwide surge in anti-Israel protests, he argues, is not organic. Rather, it reflects a long-developed propaganda infrastructure – the “hidden hand” – involving the Iranian regime, Hamas, Hezbollah and a constellation of worldwide activist organizations that have spent years building networks capable of shaping Western public opinion.

Hamas, Kinsella argues, fights two wars simultaneously. One is the familiar military campaign conducted with rockets, bullets and suicide attacks. The other is an information war, waged through imagery, messaging and propaganda. Israel may well win the first war, he suggests, but the second – the battle for global public opinion – is far less certain.

The book opens with the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. While Israelis were still grappling with the scale of the massacre, demonstrations against Israel began sweeping Western campuses and cities. In the United States, a “national student walkout” took place within days of Oct. 7. Activists insisted these events were spontaneous expressions of outrage over the war in Gaza – but many of them took place before there was even a war in Gaza.

Many of the protests, Kinsella writes, appeared to have been organized rapidly with shared messaging, identical slogans and coordinated materials. Student groups that claimed to be independent grassroots organizations were often connected to larger activist networks. Manuals, posters and protest toolkits circulated almost immediately.

This pattern is central to the book’s argument. What looks like decentralized activism, Kinsella contends, often reveals indisputable signs of coordination.

One of the more striking anecdotes in the book involves Gary Wexler, a California professor who worked with the Ford Foundation on programs in Israel and Palestine during the Oslo peace process. Wexler recalls being warned by a leading Palestinian civil society coordinator that pro-Palestinian networks would one day rival – and surpass – the vaunted Jewish advocacy organizations in their ability to mobilize globally. Funding, the activist reportedly told him, would come from European institutions, Arab governments and wealthy donors.

Years later, Wexler began to see the prediction materialize in movements such as the push for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), Israel Apartheid Week and international flotillas challenging Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Kinsella stops short of claiming a single command centre orchestrating these movements. Instead, he suggests a looser ecosystem in which state actors, activist organizations and sympathetic nongovernmental organizations amplify one another’s messaging.

If there is a common theme running through the book, it is the power of narrative.

According to Kinsella, Hamas and its allies have been remarkably successful at shaping the language through which the conflict is discussed in the West. Terms such as “colonialism,” “apartheid” and “genocide” now dominate activist discourse, particularly among younger audiences. These ideas circulate widely on social media platforms, where emotionally charged content spreads faster than verified information.

The book devotes considerable attention to misinformation and the speed at which it travels. One example Kinsella cites is the widely circulated claim that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians. The allegation ricocheted around the world within hours, sparking protests and diplomatic condemnations from the highest levels. Later evidence indicated the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad – and that the casualty figures had been exaggerated exponentially. The correction, of course, traveled neither as far nor as fast as the original claim.

Social media algorithms amplify this dynamic, Kinsella argues, pushing users toward increasingly extreme content. The phenomenon is not unique to Middle East politics. The same mechanisms drive conspiracy theories about vaccines, elections and countless other subjects. But, in the case of Israel, he suggests, the misinformation taps into something older and deeper: an antisemitic proclivity to believe the worst and most fantastical allegations about Jews.

In the contemporary context, antisemitic narratives often blend with modern ideological frameworks. In activist discourse, Jews are sometimes recast as embodiments of colonialism or “whiteness,” placing them on the oppressor side of social justice frameworks. The result, Kinsella suggests, is a rhetorical environment in which hostility toward Israel can slide easily into hostility toward Jews.

Polling data cited in the book underscores the generational divide in attitudes toward the conflict. Surveys in North America and Europe have found large numbers of younger respondents expressing sympathy for Hamas or believing that the 10/7 attacks were justified. Other polls show significant numbers of young people convinced that Israel is committing genocide. Such findings shocked even the pollsters who conducted them.

Kinsella argues that universities have played a significant role in shaping these attitudes. For decades, he writes, academic discourse has increasingly framed Israel through the lens of “settler-colonialism.” At the same time, foreign governments – particularly that of Qatar – have donated billions of dollars to Western universities.

The media also come under scrutiny. Western news organizations, he argues, routinely rely on casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, numbers that critical analysis suggests are inflated, particularly in terms of non-combatant casualties. Journalists reporting on what’s happening in Gaza frequently depend on local stringers who operate either directly under Hamas authority or in a context where anything but pro-Hamas reporting is existentially dangerous. This situation effectively grants terrorist propaganda the imprimatur of legitimate media platforms.

Because Kinsella is Canadian, The Hidden Hand is rife with Canadian content. This will be interesting to Canadian readers – and a meaningful contribution to the sad litany of incidents in this country – but it is additionally relevant because Canada has been among the worst places for these sorts of offences. Last year, an Israeli government report analyzing the problem worldwide called Canada the “champion of antisemitism.” So, while Canada may not be a major player in many of the world’s foremost competitions or concerns, when it comes to anti-Jewish discrimination, we regrettably find ourselves owning the podium. That makes what happens here – and how (or whether) we confront it – especially relevant.

The thesis of Kinsella’s book, of course, is that these problems know no boundaries (figuratively or literally).

Much of the evidence he presents is circumstantial rather than definitive. He has found no single document or intercepted communication that proves the existence of a centralized propaganda command. The accumulation of connections, coincidences and patterns is what gives the book its force, but Kinsella does not provide the proverbial smoking gun. This is partly understandable because, if there were incontrovertible proof linking ostensibly legal, legitimate activist groups in Canada and around the world with known terrorist entities, surely Western governments would have acted by now.

Ah, but there’s the rub. The very fact that someone like Kinsella, without, say, top-level security clearance, could amass such a damning catalogue of evidence begs the question of just how much effort governments and security services are devoting to this problem. That so many deeply problematic and potentially illegal cases in Canada, including here in British Columbia, have not resulted in charges or even, seemingly, any serious investigation, makes Kinsella’s book especially valuable. If there is this much smoke, where are the governmental and security agencies that are supposed to be the firefighters?

Whether one accepts all of Kinsella’s conclusions or not, The Hidden Hand forces readers to confront the possibility that the global conversation about Israel is shaped by forces far more organized and odious than many seem willing to believe.

If Hamas fights both with bombs and with words, as Kinsella argues, then the information battlefield may prove just as consequential as the physical one. And, on that battlefield, the outcome is still very much in doubt.