TORONTO — Shortly after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Warren Kinsella began noticing what he considered the fingerprints of a professional propaganda campaign.

A Canadian political strategist who has worked for decades in war rooms advising prime ministers and political campaigns in Canada, the United States and Israel, Kinsella makes that case in his new book, “The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda.”

According to Kinsella, Hamas and its networks, along with their Western followers, had thousands of social media accounts primed, protest banners ready, and talking points translated into multiple languages long before the IDF’s response to the carnage had even begun.

Kinsella believes that what may appear to be spontaneous outrage on Western streets and social feeds is, in fact, a coordinated political operation that could only be executed by state actors and professional agitators.

His new book claims Jew-hatred is being mainstreamed by outlaw states and extremist groups who use tools of modern campaigning such as message discipline, cash payouts and logistics training. These actors push slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” so quickly and uniformly that they cannot be dismissed as organic, Kinsella said.

And, he says, Western democracies have barely begun to respond.

“Almost immediately after October 7, I looked around and quickly formed the opinion that what I was seeing was an organized, professional-style political campaign, pushing out this vile, hateful propaganda against Jews, the Jewish state and Western democracy,” Kinsella, a resident of Prince Edward County, Ontario, told The Times of Israel. “I spoke to other political people I know, and they all had the same reaction.”

In October 2023, “there were thousands of protests around the planet using the same slogans,” said Kinsella, who is also a columnist for the Toronto Sun and founder of the Daisy Consulting Group.

That, to Kinsella, was either “one hell of a coincidence” or evidence of central planning.

Kinsella sees that conclusion as central to the book’s thesis and points to comments by US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who has accused Iran of seeking to fund and encourage anti-Israel protests.

“The bad guys,” he said, “have unlimited resources and armies of propaganda,” with which they have successfully convinced Westerners that Israel is an “apartheid state” and a “white supremacist colonial state bent on destroying a powerless non-white minority.”

Kinsella’s documentary film “The Campaign” — which complements the book — was first screened in Toronto on March 30. Last month, it was shown in Tel Aviv at Israel’s largest documentary film festival, Docaviv, and at Canada’s Parliament Hill for legislators.

Kinsella........

© The Times of Israel