Hidden Hand Driving War on Israel | Warren Kinsella on Global Protest Network
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The surprise is not that they've done it. The surprise has been how receptive the audience has been. Hello and welcome to State of a Nation with me, Alon Levy. Who is directing the information warfare campaign against Israel and the West and how successful has it been? Since October 7th, I've been in the trenches trying to make Israel's case on the news and so I wanted to zoom out and speak with an outsider who has nonetheless been sucked into the information war against Israel.

Warren Kinsella is a seasoned Canadian Liberal Party political operative, author of about a dozen books, who's counting at this point, journalist, and is now working on a new book, The Hidden Hand, about the information warfare against Israel and the West.

He's here in Israel and joins me now in the studio. Warren, how are you? Great. Thank you for having me. I suppose first things first, congratulations about the Liberal Party victory in Canada. Well, I'm in a position of studied neutrality now. So I'm a newspaper columnist in Canada, so I'm not allowed to take sides. But...

Yeah, it was, I think, yet another government re-elected as a consequence of the Trump effect. Really astonishing. I mean, Pierre Polyev had such a wide lead. No one was counting the Liberal Party for a fourth victory, and they managed to do it. How did that happen? At the start of the year, the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Polyev, was leading by nearly 30 points overall.

It was just a question of how big their victory would be. It was potentially going to be the biggest parliamentary majority in Canadian history. And then a couple of dramatic things happened in the month of January. Justin Trudeau left after 10 years as Liberal leader and Donald Trump arrived.

And Trump commenced doing something that he had not done in his first term, which was asserting some sort of dominance over Canada. At first we thought he was joking and talking about us as the 51st state, mocking our leadership, liberal and conservative leaders alike, and saying the most extraordinary things about us and diminishing our role internationally.

And Canadians stopped laughing and started getting very concerned. And it had a dramatic effect on public opinion. And Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and the governor of Bank of Canada, improbably became the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. And it

even Warren probably, became prime minister, select and then elect. And you had a rally around the flag effect as people began to think maybe Trump isn't joking about annexing Canada as the 51st state. Many issues, of course, on the agenda in Canada from the cost of living and gas prices and, of course, foreign policy issue regarding Israel and the safety of Jews in Canada. And I know that...

you know, studied neutrality. We'll get onto that in a moment. The election results have caused a lot of concern among the Canadian Jewish community because of how they see that the Liberal Party has either ignored or perhaps even fermented some of the hostility towards Israel and by extension, the Jewish community. And I want to talk to you about how this information war against Israel applies to the Canadian context. But first of all, look, there's a massive information war that's taking place against Israel and against the West more broadly. We'll touch on that.

It's an information war to demonize the Jewish state, but it didn't start on October 7th. It had been happening a long time before, an attempt not to criticize its policies in a war here or there, but to delegitimize Israel as a state. I wanted a moment to talk to you about how those dots are connected. But before that, I want to ask you, when did you first realize that the dots are connected, that this is, as you call it in your book, a campaign?

In the third week of October. So my background, I've been special assistant, as you pointed out, to a prime minister, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. And I've run many campaigns for Canadian, American, Israeli politicians. And, you know, when you do that kind of work, you start to recognize the signs. And about the third week in October, I started to notice that there was some extraordinary things happening around the world.

Before Israel had even commenced its ground incursion into Gaza, 2,500 protests around the world using messaging that looked segmented, looked like it had been the product of focus groups, professionally rendered signs. Organizers who seemed to be paid and it turned out were being paid. Some protesters who were being paid. It was a campaign.

I spoke to some other people I knew in Canadian-American politics, and I said, gee, this looks like a campaign. They said, absolutely, this is a campaign with lots of money behind it. And so I started digging further into it as a newspaper columnist and then later on as an author and found there were, in fact, people being paid to show up to protests. There were people receiving donations.

generous sums to organize, people's transportation, food, drink, people's legal representation in the event that they got arrested at a protest. Extraordinary things were happening and very few journalists were paying attention to it. So who is coordinating it? If you're looking at it, if your analogy and mine is that it's a campaign, I think the campaign manager is Iran.

And it would be no surprise to anybody here in Israel to hear that Iran is behind all sorts of events that are unhelpful to the state of Israel, but also to Western democracy.

No surprise that Hamas and the other proxies of Iran are acting on this campaign that has been designed and devised by Iran. But the surprise became how effective this campaign was in Western democracy. So in Canada, regrettably, in the United States and in Europe, young people in particular, so Gen Z from the ages of 18 to 24,

millennials from at the age of 25 to 38, we were seeing it in public opinion research. Because when you're in a campaign or you're a journalist, as you know, your obligation is to tell the truth to your readers or to your listeners. And so I started looking in public opinion research and was showing an extraordinary amount of pickup among Gen Z in particular, but also to a slightly lesser degree, millennials.

And I'm talking about stuff like, I support Hamas. I support the targeting of Canadian Jews. I believe that Israel needs to be wiped off the map. Like egregiously anti-Semitic, hateful points of view being embraced by wide swaths of young people. And...

You know, it was extraordinary because if you look at the research going back, as you know, the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, principally in the United States, for about 60 years has been following public opinion on prejudice. So the expressions of that are racism and anti-Semitism. And they'd always been moving in conformity. If you opposed racism, you opposed anti-Semitism. And about...

a decade ago, maybe less than a decade ago, young people started to move off.

And while they profess to be still preoccupied with racism, they were becoming less and less concerned about anti-Semitism. My view is that Iran and its proxies saw this movement in public opinion and decided to take advantage of it. They were assisted by the pandemic at a point where young people were losing their convocation ceremonies and their graduation ceremonies and moving into this online world.

and kind of isolated from reality, Iran and these other entities, Russia, China, so on, took advantage of that. And so it's something that has been underway for a long time. As I say, nobody in Israel is going to be surprised by that. The surprise is the degree of success that they have achieved in Western democracy. And I want to understand why they've been so successful and what that means. But first of all, I do have to press, what evidence do you have that Iran is behind it? I mean, there is...

a psychological phenomenon where often we see patterns where none exist and perhaps it is tempting to believe that actually a lot of spontaneous protests are

connected by an invisible hand that is guiding them when in fact there is not. So I mean, what hard evidence do we have that Iran has played a serious role beyond funding a protest here, a protest there, because this is a global movement. It is indeed. You know, in any crime, the best piece of evidence, I say this as somebody who's been a lawyer and I've practiced criminal law, the best piece of prosecutorial evidence is a confession.

and Iran at the point where the protests at Columbia and McGill and UCLA and Oxford and elsewhere were becoming more and more pronounced. It had moved from being against Iran

treatment of the Palestinians and it actually transformed itself into open anti-Semitism and in some cases advocacy for Hamas and PFLP and so on. At that point I think the campaign manager said well we can kind of cop to this it's actually going quite well and we saw the Supreme Leader in Iran and others indicating yeah we believe that we should support these young people in the West and we will and are supporting these young people in the West.

The key question arising out of your question is, is the support material or rhetorical? And we've seen... Right, I saw a statement from the supreme leader of Iran who compared the campus protesters to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis as being branches of the resistance, you know, as being different fronts of the resistance. Well, the SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, which ran every single encampment at every single university campus in Canada and the United States last summer...

They're considered to be the public relations arm of Hamas in North America.

We don't know where they get their money from. They don't do any public disclosure. We don't know who's working for them. You're telling me these organizations' finances are completely opaque? No one's been able to track down the source of the funding? We've been able to. People like me, journalists like me, have been able to track down money that they've received. The big problem in Canada and the United States is non-profits, non-governmental organizations and charities.

And so the degree of regulatory oversight that those organizations get in Canada and the United States, and to some degree in Britain, is inadequate, to say the least. So what's happening is there'll be an organization like Westchester in the United States or even Samadun in Canada who act as a flow-through. So if you donate to them, they are moving funds along to

sometimes to the Middle East, but often to these subordinate organizations to pay for legal representation, to pay for signage, what have you. And it's become, you know, in the United States of America, there are 1,500 such organizations, and they're not all doing it on a volunteer basis. They're not all doing it out of the goodness of their heart.

We've got evidence now that people are in fact being paid to show up, to organize and participate in these anti-Israel, anti-Semitic protests. Is there a smoking gun connecting it to Iran other than their confession? Because, you know, you say confession, someone else might say they're boasting. And sometimes people boast and take credit for things that they're not responsible for.

We've yet to receive a memo. There was one that was floating around. The biggest protest action, as they called it, that took place globally was on April 15th of last year. And so that was to shut down capitalism, which kind of is interesting because it testified to the nexus between the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic forces, but also kind of the far left. And so there has become an unholy alliance there. And they shut down...

businesses, government offices, major transportation arteries right across Western democracy. In that instance, Iranian dissidents came up with a document that they professed to be a planning document by the IRGC that here's what's going to happen, boys and girls, and here's how we're going to do it. I haven't been able to satisfy myself as a journalist that that document is authentic.

Do I believe such planning documentation exists somewhere out there? Yes. But nobody's gotten their hand on it yet. You pointed Iran, but I wondered if we could actually unpack the role of Qatar. Because Qatar has in recent years been the single biggest donor to American universities. It's donated, what, $6.3 billion buying influence in American universities. A third of that, nearly a third of that, was in the last four years alone. $2 billion. What?

What is Qatar up to and how effective has that influence buying among American elite institutions think tanks universities been? Well, it was wonderful to support post-secondary education everybody should do it and We need we need better educational institutions, but if you look I'm not sure I want despotic regimes supporting it because it always comes with an ask and it did in the case of Carnegie Mellon in Philadelphia, so this is an Ivy League University storied reputation

And they received millions upon millions from Qatar over a bit of a decade.

They did not disclose it. They're required by law in the United States of America to disclose monies that they're receiving from foreign entities. They and Harvard and Columbia did not. In the case of Carnegie Mellon, what's interesting is if you did a correlation between or an extrapolation between the money being received by them and the explosion in anti-Semitism at that university, they just move in tandem.

Is there causation linking them? I believe so. How? Explain the mechanism. Funding of foundations within the universities, funding of professorships within these universities. You know, I think there was one individual I spoke to. His name's Gary Wexler. I don't know if you've ever spoken to him. He's American, working for an Israeli NGO about 30 years ago. And...

He spoke to one Palestinian who said to him, we've learned from you, we've learned from the Jews. We're going to set up foundations. We're going to set up think tanks. We're going to create our own media. This is like in the days that predated the Internet. We are going to create our own information and academic nexus upon which we are going to build this story. No longer are we just going to be reacting. We are going to be proactive.

And it's precisely what they've done. And that's my point is the surprise is not that they've done it. The surprise has been how receptive the audience has been. And why has the audience been so receptive? Because I can take billions of dollars and try to organize protests in favor of Israel and the United States.

It probably wouldn't work, okay? Campaigns only work. And you know this is a seasoned political operative. They only work if you're pushing on the right buttons among your community. You can't just pour money and make people jump into action. So what is that weakness, that vulnerability that Qatar, Iran, whoever it is, has been exploiting, finding that they suddenly landed on fertile ground to wage this information war against Israel? It's the responsive cord.

There was a Democratic operative named Tony Schwartz who did one of the most famous advertising campaigns in political history, and I spoke to him about it. And he said in every individual, in every voter, in every consumer, there is a set of values, and values defined as this kind of ineffable stuff of life, hopes and dreams and fears, things that you can't define. If you can put them in words, they almost aren't values.

He said, everybody has those. So he said the objective of every advertiser, every politician, every community leader is to find that responsive court. And so in this case, with young people in the West, in North America and Europe, it has been this anti-Israel theme. And so what I've tried to examine in the book— Why? Why? Why?

Because of that divergence that took place that the IADL found is their preoccupation with racism remained a constant, but their concern about anti-Semitism diminished. I'm going to be an annoying kid, but why? But why? Because they regard this, this place that you and I are in, as an apartheid fascist state. But...

Why? Because if they already regard Israel as an apartheid fascist state, it means someone has already been very successful at information warfare and indoctrinating them. So let's take it down to source. How did this happen that so many... No, let's not just talk about the proximate cause. Someone arranged a protest in the last two years. This isn't about the last two years. What happened in the West that we lost an entire generation who were sold a vicious lie

In the support of some horrible Islamist regimes. How did that happen? Two reasons, I would say. So there was this divergence in public opinion where they started to believe that by opposing Israel, they were opposing racism. It was an apartheid state in the way that South Africa was. By opposing Israel. It's not that by opposing Israel, they're standing up to, they're opposing the West, although those may be interconnected.

It's by opposing Israel, they're opposing racism. Correct. Writ large. And you come here, you know, anybody who comes here, it's this diverse, pluralistic state. But the two things that have happened that are consequential for young people and all of us is the economic collapse of the traditional media. There's no Canadian news bureau in the state of Israel now. None.

Into that void has entered Hamas. Hamas had in Gaza a team of 160 people churning out social media, which is the other part of the story, is the social media growth within the organization of the bad guys. And I say this as somebody who loves Israel and loves the Israeli people. Israel really sucks at telling its own story.

That's why guys like you are important. That's why I reached out to you for my book.

is Israel has a story to tell that is completely different than the prejudice that has developed throughout Western democracy. But when you have no more news organizations here documenting that story, when you have a very capable social media enterprise being developed by monsters in the shape of men, then you're going to start to lose the communication, the information war, as you have put it so many times.

And that's what I believe. I believe Israel will ultimately prevail militarily, but it is getting its ass kicked on the information war front. Right. So the problem isn't so much the traditional media as the fact that traditional media are being bypassed by terrorist groups who are very good at propaganda, who are able to touch on a

vulnerability in the Western mindset, which is the perception that standing up to Israel means standing up to racism. And yet I come back to the question, if that perception has already taken root, it means there was an information war waged many, many decades ago that was successful. So how did people in Canada come to see that?

standing up to Israel as being standing up to racism rather than standing up for, you know, the one minority in the Middle East that was able to form its own state out of the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. That is the way to stand up to racism. That taking the side of the country founded by Holocaust survivors and Jews kicked out of Arab countries, that's the way to stand up to racism. And it's the country where if you're gay, you're safe.

And that is not true of any of the countries surrounding. If you are somebody who believes that democracy is the vigorous exchange of opinion, it's the only place where you're safe. Yeah, it doesn't get more vigorous than here. So how is it? Again, it testifies to the fact of the campaign. It is extraordinary that they've been so successful at getting their story out in the face of contrary facts.

And so, you know, what I believe is it's a campaign that has been, as Gary Wexler and others have said, it's been underway for 30 years.

And the bad guys have decided we are going to create our own think tanks. We're going to have our own foundations. We're going to target academia. In particular, they're going to target the Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch and Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders because young people are attracted to the persuasion of those institutions as well. Unions, academics, so on. So basically... Right, a generation that ironically claims to be the most...

And individualist really holds a lot of store by the halo effect of organizations with fancy sounding names like Save the Children or Amnesty International. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I was, it seems like a long time ago, but I was young once. And I was like every young person, you know, you oppose your parents, you oppose government, you oppose your teachers and so on. And as you get older, you know, you start to learn, of course, that there's much more grays in the atmosphere than you considered before.

But these guys have been very capable, like a multinational, like some of the professional political parties, at segmenting their messaging for a particular audience.

And so if you look at the public opinion research, and this is the, I don't want to depress the hell out of everybody. If you look at the public opinion research over about the age of 40 in Western democracy, there's overwhelming support for Israel. There's overwhelming support for the notion that Israel should be able to defend itself within safe and secure borders, that Israel has a right, a right to defend itself against this cult of murderers.

But there is divergence within this group from about 18 to 38. And it's the product, I believe, of this concerted, well-funded, well-organized campaign that's been underway for many, many years. Do you think that trend is inevitable? Will these people simply waltz into positions of power and that's it? There's just a generational change in Western countries are going to turn on Israel inevitably? Or is there still some wiggle room?

It's like in any political campaign, you know, I'll tell you, it's never one thing. As you pointed out at the start of the show, you know, Canada has had this big change. A lot of people have tried to reassure themselves it's just Trump, but it wasn't just Trump. In politics, there's no single thing that makes you win and no single thing that makes you lose. It's a confluence of factors. Uh,

So there is, you know, Israel not being particularly good about telling its story. It's been the economic collapse of mainstream media, the surge in social media that's got no oversight, no professional standards. You've got a prime minister who has been in power for a long time.

If we're advising him, I would say it's time for you to go. You get about 10 years in politics and people get sick of your face. And he's very unpopular in the West. So he's precisely the wrong person to be advocating for Israel in the English language around the world. There's a number of factors at play here. The frightening thing is the number of young people who have bought into what is unvarnished hate.

And, you know, it's not going to be a fix that we're going to be able to do in a weekend. It's taken 20 years to get to this point. It may take us just as long to get out of it.

What practical steps do you propose? If already we're thinking in terms of the language of a campaign, it's clear you can't play whack-a-mole here and it's not about disputing casualty numbers here or pointing out how many trucks of international aid Israel has let into Gaza. This is a much, much bigger question. So how can Israel and its supporters begin to mount a fight back? At the conclusion of Hidden Hand, I offer some solutions. Among them are the social media...

Mavens have realized billions from their platforms and they have enormous power. With that power, it must come responsibility. So they need to realize that we expect them to be in the business of promoting truth, not lies, and to change the way in which they do business. Which means going back to the framework of fact-checking and not having a free-for-all platform.

on social media, right? There is a tension between seeing these platforms as needing to promote truth and a commitment to free speech because free speech includes the right to spout drivel. Enforcing their own end user agreement. Like that's why I say to them all the time, these are your own rules. You promulgated these rules. Enforce them. So too in Western democracy, in Canada, in the United States, it is an offense to commit an offense wearing a mask.

And, you know, that has been a common element of all of these hateful protests around Western democracy is they're wearing masks. That's a criminal offense. So what I'm saying is enforce the laws that are already on the books. We don't have to create new laws. We actually have those already. We don't need new bubble zone laws. We already have those in respect of abortion clinics and hospitals. We need to say, you guys need to ensure that somebody going to synagogue to worship is

when they're at their most vulnerable, needs to be protected. So that, again, is something that's already written down. And then in respect to the media, I think that Israel and Western democracy, there needs to be a better coverage of this place, of this country.

And it used to exist. In the case of Canada, our lead broadcaster, supported by the state, is the CBC. It has become a fulcrum for anti-Semitic content over the past... Anti-Semitic content? Anti-Semitic content. That's a very big allegation. It is. And, well, for example, they've got somebody who's an editor. I hear from journalists they're...

on a regular basis, who wears a keffiyeh in the newsroom. He's permitted to do that, but he publishes blood libels on social media. I got in touch with his bosses. I said, what about this guy? They said, oh, he's permitted to do that. Their representative in Gaza, their eyes and ears, to quote their own phrase, is somebody who has promoted Hamas. He is their cameraman in Gaza, paid for by me, the tax payer.

So, you know, that is a change that we need in the mainstream media. And, you know, we need better coverage of the Israeli story. Israel sells itself if news organizations commit to coming here at times other than a missile landing at Ben-Gurion. Well,

Well, actually, I'm sorry. Nobody covered that, I think, except for me. Really? In Western democracy. Iran's proxy army in Yemen fires a ballistic missile that by a hair's breadth avoids a mass casualty event inside the airport terminal. It doesn't get covered by Canadian media. No, no.

No, I wrote a column about it, commenting on the fact that it attracted no attention. My girlfriend was on the way to the airport at that time, and we were both talking about how extraordinary how courageous Israelis are, living under the yoke of death and doom on a regular basis. But the total disinterest of the West in this important story, if that had happened outside of Heathrow,

If that had happened outside of Pearson and Toronto, we would have shut down those countries. Like, it would have shut down those airports at the very least. So there is an unfairness clearly towards Israel, and there needs to be a better commitment to coverage here. And then in respect of all those different institutions I enumerated, you know, unions and academia and so on, there needs to be, you know, some self-analysis, some critical self-analysis and change.

You speak specifically in the context of the information war about the information war against Israel, which is playing off on this dynamic that at some point, opposition to racism and opposition to anti-Semitism veered off. But I wonder more broadly whether you identify any information war against the West or...

more broadly and whether these campaigns are connected or they're different? What do you see? I was at a protest in Toronto. Every single weekend they're out right in the center of Toronto by our largest shopping center. And it was fascinating walking around there because you had the usual crew who were shouting slogans and hateful things about the Jewish state.

But you also had this group of international socialists and Marxists and so on. So as I indicated earlier, there has been this unholy alliance that has come together and they've recognized that they have some shared interests. And

they've organized together and you see that across North America to some degree in, in the United Kingdom as well. And, um, I think what's happened with the far left, my first book was about what I called an unholy alliance between different organizations that were anti-Semitic. So the nation of Islam, the American Indian movement, the Aryan resistance movement, all of these organizations, uh,

were quite different. They were racial separatists, but they came together for their shared hatred of Israel and they were funded by Libya. So this is really an extension of that, but a much more effective extension of that or representation of that model. You know, I think that's what Colonel Gaddafi was, uh,

attempting to do. That's what others have attempted to do. I think Iran, with the assistance of their banker in Qatar and so on, has achieved it. You know, if anybody in Israel goes to the West, they're guaranteed they're going to be very sad. They're going to be depressed about what they see. And just the unbridled hatred being expressed towards this place that is unfair and untrue.

And it's not based in fact, it's based in something else entirely. And it needs to be confronted. Warren, this has been a fascinating discussion. Really interesting to hear your outsider's perspective. Although, given how deeply you've been sucked down the rabbit hole of investigating this, I'm not sure it's fair to call you an outsider anymore. Warren, when is your book, The Hidden Hand, coming out? And how can people follow your work? It's coming out with Penger and

Random House in the fall is the plan. And we're also doing a documentary based upon it. And you've very kindly agreed to participate in that. And that too is coming out towards the end of the year. So thanks for having me on. And best place to follow you on social media? Yes. Which bypasses the traditional media that's short-circuited anyway. Yeah. So, you know, I've stayed there. I keep the fight going. And I think it's important not to vacate the battlefield. So, yeah, I'm on X and Facebook and all of the usual ones. Okay. What's your handle?

Kinsella Warren on X and Warren Kinsella. I've got a few platforms on Facebook. Very confusing. It's the other way around. Warren Kinsella, Kinsella Warren, whatever your name is. Thank you very much for coming on State of a Nation. Thanks, my friend.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of a Nation. As always, if you enjoy these episodes, please subscribe on whatever platform you get your podcasts. Give us a like. State of a Pod on social media. If you want to sponsor any of these episodes, get in touch with us on social media, either State of a Pod or get in touch with me directly on social media. And we'd love to have you sponsor an episode here of State of a Nation. I'm Elon Levy and thanks for joining.