Warren Kinsella, a Canadian lawyer, author and political consultant has written an excellent book about the explosion of online Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred and of the additional propaganda and disinformation techniques deployed by the enemies of the Jewish people and Israel since October 7, 2023. Kinsella shows that Israel has been in two wars since October 7, 2023: a military war on multiple fronts that it has handled well and an information or propaganda war that is doing a great deal of damage to Israel.
Because he is a political consultant, Kinsella recognizes organized campaigns when he sees them and he also recognizes failures to respond to organized campaigns. Kinsella states his position this way: ‘the anti-Israel, antisemitic, anti-West, pro-Hamas campaign…isn’t just similar to a well-organized, well-financed, and professionally run political campaign. It actually is a well-organized, well-financed and professionally run political style propaganda campaign.’
Not only was Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred far more widespread than any of us believed before October 7, he concludes, but also Jew-hatred and hatred of the little Jewish state have been amplified ‘by a cruel and effective propaganda campaign the likes of which few of us have ever seen in our lifetimes.’
Hamas’s goal on October 7 was not only to rape, kidnap, murder, terrorize and demoralize Israel. It was also to poison global opinion against Israel. They could do that by turning Israel’s allies against Israel and by convincing ordinary people that Israel is evil incarnate. That is why the Israel-haters so often wield the key words that inspire revulsion even though none of them are true: ‘genocide,’’extermination,’ ‘starvation,’ ‘famine,’‘apartheid,’ ‘white supremacist,’ ‘fascist,’ ‘colonialist.’ The fact that those are all false when said about Israel is irrelevant to the people who deploy them. They want their audience to say about October 7, that ‘The Jews had it coming.’
Those on the anti-Israel side of the information war, Iran, Qatar, Hamas, Hezbollah, several far-Left organizations and a large array of Islamic NGOs and charities, the United Nations and increasingly Russia and China, had been pursuing this track for some decades before October 7 and had the machinery and algorithms for disseminating anti-Israel material in place. Immediately after that date they increased their production exponentially.
At the same time they hid, denied and downplayed Hamas’ ultimate goal which was to rid the Middle East of Jews who they call ‘Zionist invaders’ and pretend that Hamas did not want to kill all the Jews in the world (not just in Israel).
They did not admit that Hamas recognized propaganda and lying as a proper way to conduct the Jihad, the holy war, against the Jews and the West.
Within days of the October 7 massacre Hamas’ allies in the West were pumping out their disinformation, calling for a ‘cease-fire,’ even before Israeli troops entered Gaza. They spread their message quickly through fake accounts, bots, troll farms and other methods on Facebook, X, TikTok and other platforms. Unfortunately, this is where many young people get their ‘news.’ The volume of materials increased so suddenly and the quality and messaging of it was so similar that experts concluded the publication of it had to be organized and co-ordinated. Kinsella consulted several cyber-security and analytics companies. All of them believed that the flood of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish material on the internet right after October 7 was a well-prepared and organized campaign.
Moreover, Anti-Jewish Islamist and Leftist organizations helped Western high school and college students organize anti-Israel protests. Hamas allies in the U.S. for instance, handed out protest ‘toolkits’ to students with lists of talking points and demands and gave instructions on how to organize protests and rallies to make them look like they were ‘organic’ or organized by the students themselves. Jihad supporting organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Council on American Islamic Relations and organizations that claimed to be interested in the ‘rights of palestinians’ but were really just interested in advancing the war against Israel swung into action. They flooded the streets, the news and the internet with anti-Israel, anti-Jewish propaganda.
The talking points and the methods echoed each other from coast to coast in the U.S. and in Canada. Of course, it was co-ordinated through a number groups affiliated with each other and all devoted to destroying the little Jewish state. The rapid deployment of the disinformation campaign against Israel allowed Hamas to shape the discourse around the Arab rape, kidnap and murder of Jews and others in southern Israel.
Kinsella also describes, in some detail, the compilation video of the Hamas murderers, kidnappers and rapists made from their go-pro cameras and cell phones on October 7. He does this to make the point that although the Israel-haters and their allies often claim that Jews control the media the approximately 1.8 billion Moslems in the world combined with their millions of Jew-hating allies who are mostly Leftists, but also some on the Right, outnumber the approximately 16 million Jews in the world by more than one hundred and twenty to one. The Jew-haters are also awash in oil money from Qatar, Iran and donations from others.
As one of the experts Kinsella consulted points out, kidnap, rape and murder of Jews is acceptable in the Moslem world. For instance, pro-‘palestinian’ posters in New York City after October 7 proclaimed that Israel must be destroyed ‘By any means necessary!’ and ‘Rape is resistance.’ The Israel-haters also argued that all Israeli civilians are legitimate targets of violence because they are ‘settlers’ and‘occupiers.’
When glorifying their barbarity did not advance their cause they tried to justify it. When justifying it did not work, the Jew-haters’ fallback position was denial. When all else failed they claimed there was no rape, Israel orchestrated the October 7 massacre so that Israel could murder ‘palestinians’ and Jews were profiting from the war.
Kinsella notes that most young people, particularly the under thirty crowd have grown up in an age of massive social, economic and political upheaval and are distrustful of democratic institutions. Those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine were the most receptive to antisemitic messaging. While young men are heading towards the culture of machismo, young women trend in the other direction, towards ultra-progressive causes. Many of the rightist young men and the leftist young women have embraced hatred of Israel and Jews. TikTok is their favored platform and that is the platform on which antisemitic and anti-Israel material runs wild.
TikTok is owned and run by Chinese and the Chinese Communist Party, an ally of Hamas, has embedded political cells in TikTok’s management to see that the party’s favored messages are promoted, including the anti-Israel message. The messages promoted include that Israel and Jews are rich, white, colonial, apartheid oppressors and therefore the embodiment of every negative stereotype of Western civilization. It is the demonization of Israel as the symbol of the West.
Israel was completely unprepared for the propaganda campaign which its enemies had prepared for years. Unlike their enemies, Israel did not have an army of spin doctors, troll farms, fake content creators. Israel did not have the means to unleash an avalanche of its own information or to refute the tidal wave of lies about it. The Israelis had not prepared for the centralized, unified, highly professional and well-financed propaganda campaign against it. Perhaps it was because the Israelis were so used to being lied about by the overwhelming number of their enemies that they had not worried more about the information war.
But, Kinsella points out, for the long term these attitudes endanger Israel. Young people will one day be the majority of Western voters and will control policy. For the long term, anti-Israel bigotry is very dangerous. The consumers of this material do not understand that the final goal of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis is to establish a global caliphate and the little Jewish state is the first and the most determined obstacle to that cause. That is what the war is really about.
Even the so-called respectable media have joined in the Israel-bashing. ‘By and large …Western media take a singular narrative -that Israel is an oppressor and that the Palestinians are the oppressed. They run every story through that lens.’ Many refuse to refer to the armed and trained rapists, kidnappers and murderers of Hamas as ‘terrorists’ instead calling them ‘fighters’ or ‘dissidents’ or ‘warriors’ or ‘militants’ or some other euphemism to hide their malevolence and brutality when they should be called the criminals that they are. Much of the press treat the Gaza Health Ministry, and far-left, Israel-bashing NGOs as reliable sources, quoting those as if they are authoritative.
They refer to Judea and Samaria (as well as for some of them, Jerusalem) as ‘occupied territory.’ As one commentator said to Kinsella, ‘We’ve put a couple of generations [of students] through journalism school in the era of the oppressed versus the oppressor narrative.’ That lens combined with radical identity politics leads to Holocaust inversion: claiming that Israel is perpetrating a Holocaust on the Arabs who call themselves ‘palestinians,’ even though no such thing is happening. Frauds such as the ‘famine’ hoax and the false claim that Israel bombed a hospital killing 500 people perpetrated by New York Times and the constant braying of the BBC are just examples of how much the mainstream media has been taken in.
Moreover, Hamas controls the release of news from Gaza and will only work with sympathetic outlets through approved reporters and stringers. As it turned out, of course, some of the reporters for favored outlets, like al-Jazeera were also Hamas snipers, bomb-makers and soldiers. Qatari owned Al-Jazeera, read throughout the Arab world and also published in English routinely prints stories which are patently false but which are believed by people willing to believe them. It isn’t just propaganda. It is indoctrination into an ideology.
Multiple studies and sources show that the money for the anti-Israel anti-Jewish campaign in the West comes primarily from Iran, Qatar and to a lesser extent China and Russia. Even when they are funding propaganda, walkouts, protests and demonstrations, not terrorism, the enemies of the West will fund whatever weakens the West. They do this through a shadowy web of Middle Eastern banks, Islamic ‘charities’ and ‘non-profits’ and of organizations that pretend to have charitable and political purposes which are legal, but which are really bent on destroying the State of Israel and expelling all the Jews from the Middle East. They also operate in reverse, so to speak, by collecting money in the West, mostly from Moslems, supposedly for charitable purposes and forwarding it to organizations in the Middle East that use the money to fund terrorism-the infamous Holy Land Fund and Samidoun being well-known examples.
Kinsella’s The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Anti-Semitic Propaganda (Signal Books, 2026) is admirably detailed and fact-based, makes use of a wide range of reliable sources including interviews with experts and is presented in a clear, straightforward and highly readable style. The book addresses many of the issues that should bother us about how Israel’s status in the world has fallen- not because of anything Israel has done, but because of the concerted, concentrated, deliberate, organized and well-financed campaign to foist off Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred on a public that does not know how to sensibly judge the disinformation. Although Kinsella makes some suggestions about how to limit antisemitic propaganda, the sad fact is that for the audience of people willing to believe anti-Israel and Jew-hating propaganda, facts are unlikely to change their minds. They will believe what they want to believe.
Michael Krampner is a Jerusalem-based writer, Ph.D. in Jewish history, and retired American trial lawyer whose writings and book reviews primarily focus on Jewish history, historical warfare, judicial reform, and geopolitical critique.