Alan Skorski recently sat down with Canadian attorney, journalist, and best-selling author, Warren Kinsella, to talk about his new book, The Hidden Hand: The Information War And The Rise Of Antisemitic Propaganda.When asked what specific event following October 7 made him realize that the “rallies” were part of a larger professionally organized campaign, and not “organic” demonstrations against Israel, Warren Kinsella answered, “There were 2500 protests around the world…” while Israel was still recovering and trying to identify their dead, injured and kidnapped. According to Kinsella, the sameness in the protests with the same slogans and messages, even if in different languages, the professional signs, and their acting in a way that was almost with “military precision.” He continued, “the tool kits handed out by group organizers like Students for Justice in Palestine, instructing students who to call if they get arrested, assuring them that their legal expenses would be covered…”. “It was the organization, money, and coherence that you just don’t see in an organic spontaneous response to an event. It was clear that this was a “campaign.””Skorski then followed up with comments from the book, where the author wrote about Gary Wexler, who at around the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993, met an Israeli-Arab NGO leader named Ameer Makhoul. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t about politics but about grants from the Ford Foundation to help Arabs and Israeli’s build a new peace together. At that meeting, Makhoul wasn’t interested in grants or peace or coexistence. According to the author, Makhoul looked straight into the eyes of Gary Wexler and said; “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.” Kinsella continued by saying how they watched Jewish activism for decades, including programs like Birthright, and created their own infrastructure to dominate an information war against Israel.During the interview, the author said he focused more on the young people who were the prime targets of Hamas and their allies in Iran, Russia, and Qatar. Kinsella cited a poll from the highly regarded Harris pollsters who documented that 70% of young Americans were more sympathetic to Hamas than to Israel following October 7.While discussing the propaganda strategy and their effectiveness, Kinsella was astounded at how Hamas, on the one hand, was able to live stream the horrors they perpetrated, yet on the other hand deny that they perpetrated October 7, and that it was the Israeli’s themselves who did it in order to justify their ground war against Gaza. Kinsella described this as a “binary communication strategy” that is almost impossible to pull off in a campaign, yet Hamas was able to. Hamas targeted the Arab/Muslim audience for recruitment with their horrific images, then played the softer Hamas side to influence the easily susceptible audiences in the West.On the issue of political races, the author writes in his book, that the bad guys know that city councils don’t make foreign policy but they create pillars and building blocks, that through higher elected offices, the foreign policy agenda seeps up until they hit the Federal level, which is their ultimate aim, to control US foreign policy.During the interview, Kinsella was very clear that the “campaign” to delegitimize Israel was based on antisemitism and had nothing to do with policy or the Israeli government. During the conversation and in his book, the author debunks the blood-libel that Israel committed “genocide” against the citizens of Gaza. He went on to say that Hamas are “experts” at attacking Jews and provoking a harsh response that will inevitable lead to casualties in Gaza, but those are propaganda points for Hamas.As a prime example of media propaganda in support of Hamas, the author wrote about in his book and spoke about during the interview is when President Biden visited Israel to demonstrate solidarity with Israel. On that day, a rocket attack hit a hospital in Gaza. As if perfectly timed, the NY Times and other major news outlets ran screaming headlines, accusing Israel of bombing a hospital and killing hundreds of civilians. The problem with that was, the hospital wasn’t hit, there were little to no fatalities, and it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad who fired the rockets. But by the time the truth came out, the desired effects of the anti-Israel bias had already made its way around the globe.
