Warren Kinsella, left, and Ben Mulroney at Montreal\u2019s Beth Israel Beth Aaron Synagogue June 19. <\/i>(photo by Dave Gordon)<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/i>In 1980, when Warren Kinsella was in Calgary performing with his punk rock band, one of his friends tapped him on the shoulder to say some men in the crowd were giving a Nazi salute.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t believe him. I didn\u2019t think it was possible,\u201d said Kinsella, now a Toronto Sun<\/i> columnist, at a recent talk. \u201cThere, in fact, were three big guys, shaved heads, T-shirts, jeans, suspenders, Doc Martin boots, coloured laces, and they were making Nazi salutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kinsella confronted one of them, twice asking him to stop the salutes, and was greeted with an expletive and the word \u201cJew.\u201d As the Irish-Catholic Kinsella tells it, a fist came his way, he hit back \u2013 a fight involving his buddies and the skinheads erupted. Eventually, the \u201cskinheads retreated, battered or bruised,\u201d said Kinsella. After the show, one of them pointed at Kinsella, saying, \u201cWe\u2019ll be back.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAnd the truth, my friends, is they never really left.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On June 19, at Montreal\u2019s Beth Israel Beth Aaron Synagogue, Kinsella was joined by syndicated radio host Ben Mulroney, who acted as the moderator of the event called Weaponizing Genocide: Exposing Propaganda and Hate in the Age of Misinformation. It was a fundraiser for the Foundation for Genocide Education, which was founded in 2014 by Heidi Berger, a child of Holocaust survivors. The nonprofit aims to ensure that the subject of genocide is taught in North American high schools.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Since that incident 45 years ago, Kinsella has battled Jew-hatred as a lawyer and as a journalist \u2013 at times with rifles jammed in his chest, police protection, bomb threats and death threats.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen lots of hate, but I have never seen it as bad as it is,\u201d he said at the June event. What the Jewish people are fighting is not only a seven-front military war, but a propaganda war \u201cwe are losing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Kinsella, the author of 10 books, will soon publish The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda<\/i>, along with an accompanying documentary.<\/p>\n Exactly 18 months before Oct. 7, 2023, social media profiles started popping up all around the Muslim world, Kinsella said. They had \u201cvery few followers\u201d and were filled with \u201cstuff about soccer matches and celebrities and pictures of kittens.\u201d On the morning of the seventh, as Hamas and its allies were attacking Israel, thousands of these social media profiles came to life, he said, noting those that had just a few followers suddenly had half a million.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey pushed out lies,\u201d he said, such as \u201cthere had been no murder, no rapes.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt was an indication of how sophisticated and how effective these guys were, as they were able to get that word out into the stratosphere,\u201d said Kinsella.<\/p>\n \u201cAntisemites,\u201d he added, \u201cknow that \u2026 this is the greatest political, cultural and economic revolution of our lifetimes,\u201d with Generation Z\u2019s primary source of information being TikTok, \u201cone of the principal platforms for antisemitism on the planet.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After the event, Berger told the Jewish Independent<\/i> that social media literacy for students is critical, to \u201clearn when the term genocide is being used to manipulate their views and their emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n In his remarks, Kinsella said some three million members of Gen Z in Canada believe Israel should be wiped off the map and that Hamas was justified in its actions. Weeks before Israel sent troops into Gaza, he said, young people across Western democracies were chanting the lies that they had seen online.<\/p>\n These were organized campaigns of protests, with professionally made signs, and the \u201cdisrupting and terrorizing of Jewish neighbourhoods with military precision,\u201d said Kinsella. \u201cThey had talking points. They had food, drink, transportation. They even had legal representation for free….\u00a0 <\/span>And many of them were being paid to show up.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He said, \u201cIt was principally a campaign to seize the sympathies of our young. And it\u2019s a campaign that\u2019s winning.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Kinsella, president of Daisy Consulting Group, who has worked for various high-profile US and Canadian political campaigns, noticed that protesters used pithy phrases \u201cvery much like what political mainstream parties do,\u201d such as \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d and \u201cfree Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u2019s against freedom?\u201d he asked. \u201cIt\u2019s nice.\u201d<\/p>\n Media, government and nongovernmental organizations continue to take Hamas at its word, said Kinsella, citing an early example. On Oct. 17, 2023, when the Gazan Health Ministry declared that Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City had been bombed by Israel and that 500 people were dead, it made headlines around the world. \u201cThe bombing was cited as evidence of Israel\u2019s genocidal war,\u201d yet evidence later showed it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the parking lot, and perhaps a few dozen were killed.<\/p>\n The day of the Montreal talk, Iran bombed Soroka Medical Centre in Beer Sheva, Israel \u2013 a war crime that almost no media reported on, said Kinsella.<\/p>\n \u201cThe line I always use with politicians: facts tell, but stories sell,\u201d said Kinsella. \u201cThat\u2019s why they try to overwhelm us, because they know if our story gets heard, if it gets seen, if it gets read, they will be defeated, because, at the end of the day, their story is a litany of hate.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n