Warren Kinsella, left, and Ben Mulroney at Montreal’s Beth Israel Beth Aaron Synagogue June 19. (photo by Dave Gordon)
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.
“I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think it was possible,” said Kinsella, now a Toronto Sun columnist, at a recent talk. “There, in fact, were three big guys, shaved heads, T-shirts, jeans, suspenders, Doc Martin boots, coloured laces, and they were making Nazi salutes.”
Kinsella confronted one of them, twice asking him to stop the salutes, and was greeted with an expletive and the word “Jew.” As the Irish-Catholic Kinsella tells it, a fist came his way, he hit back – a fight involving his buddies and the skinheads erupted. Eventually, the “skinheads retreated, battered or bruised,” said Kinsella. After the show, one of them pointed at Kinsella, saying, “We’ll be back.”
“And the truth, my friends, is they never really left.”
On June 19, at Montreal’s 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.
Since that incident 45 years ago, Kinsella has battled Jew-hatred as a lawyer and as a journalist – at times with rifles jammed in his chest, police protection, bomb threats and death threats.
“I’ve seen lots of hate, but I have never seen it as bad as it is,” he said at the June event. What the Jewish people are fighting is not only a seven-front military war, but a propaganda war “we are losing,” he said.
Kinsella, the author of 10 books, will soon publish The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, along with an accompanying documentary.
Exactly 18 months before Oct. 7, 2023, social media profiles started popping up all around the Muslim world, Kinsella said. They had “very few followers” and were filled with “stuff about soccer matches and celebrities and pictures of kittens.” 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.
“They pushed out lies,” he said, such as “there had been no murder, no rapes.”
“It was an indication of how sophisticated and how effective these guys were, as they were able to get that word out into the stratosphere,” said Kinsella.
“Antisemites,” he added, “know that … this is the greatest political, cultural and economic revolution of our lifetimes,” with Generation Z’s primary source of information being TikTok, “one of the principal platforms for antisemitism on the planet.”
After the event, Berger told the Jewish Independent that social media literacy for students is critical, to “learn when the term genocide is being used to manipulate their views and their emotions.”
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.
These were organized campaigns of protests, with professionally made signs, and the “disrupting and terrorizing of Jewish neighbourhoods with military precision,” said Kinsella. “They had talking points. They had food, drink, transportation. They even had legal representation for free…. And many of them were being paid to show up.”
He said, “It was principally a campaign to seize the sympathies of our young. And it’s a campaign that’s winning.”
Kinsella, president of Daisy Consulting Group, who has worked for various high-profile US and Canadian political campaigns, noticed that protesters used pithy phrases “very much like what political mainstream parties do,” such as “from the river to the sea” and “free Palestine.”
“Who’s against freedom?” he asked. “It’s nice.”
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. “The bombing was cited as evidence of Israel’s genocidal war,” yet evidence later showed it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the parking lot, and perhaps a few dozen were killed.
The day of the Montreal talk, Iran bombed Soroka Medical Centre in Beer Sheva, Israel – a war crime that almost no media reported on, said Kinsella.
“The line I always use with politicians: facts tell, but stories sell,” said Kinsella. “That’s 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.”
Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world. His website is davegordonwrites.com.