The invitation had gone out quietly, almost like a secret, and that was exactly the point. Warren Kinsella was coming to Queen’s University to talk about information warfare, antisemitism, and the fight for public opinion, but the location of the lecture was kept under wraps until ninety minutes before the doors opened. The reason for the secrecy was heavy in the air. Just days earlier, a gunman had attacked a synagogue in nearby Belleville, Ontario, during Yom Kippur services. The shooter was killed, but not before a police officer providing security outside was wounded, and the shock of that violence rippled through the Jewish community across the region. Now, in a lecture hall on campus, more than 150 people gathered to hear Kinsella speak. They filed in quietly, some scanning the room, others checking the exits. It was a crowd that looked different from the usual university audience. There were a few families and a handful of law students, but most of the people in the room were decades past their own campus days. They had learned about the event not through posters or campus emails, but through the networks that had helped organize it: the Jewish Law Students Association, B’nai Brith, and other community organizations. The average age of the room was likely pulled down only by the students who chose to watch online from home. There was a sense of gravity to the evening, a feeling that this was not just another guest lecture, but a gathering of people who had come to understand something that felt increasingly urgent and personal.
Kinsella, a political consultant, lawyer, and journalist who once served as a key adviser to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, was not there to read from his book or show clips from his documentary. Instead, he stood before the crowd and spoke extemporaneously, a storyteller and a fighter wrapped into one. His latest book, The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, had been published by Penguin Random House Canada that spring, and he had also produced and narrated a documentary, The Campaign: Disinformation in a Time of War. But this evening was not a promotional event. It was a warning. Kinsella has worked on political campaigns “from California to Israel,” so when he spoke about the mechanics of persuasion and manipulation, he spoke with the authority of someone who had spent a lifetime inside the machinery of public opinion. He described, with something close to professional admiration mixed with disgust, how Hamas had built a messaging apparatus more sophisticated than anything he had ever seen in Western politics. Within minutes of the October 7, 2023 attacks, while the attackers were still on Israeli soil, thousands of bots had been activated across social media. Disinformation and propaganda spread with breathtaking speed, reaching hundreds of millions of screens worldwide. This was not a matter of selective facts or spinning a story. It was, Kinsella argued, a campaign of pure fabrication, whole-cloth fictions designed to overwhelm and confuse, to exploit the vulnerabilities of open societies and the algorithms that keep people angry and afraid.
The core of Kinsella’s argument was simple but chilling: Hamas knew from the beginning that it could never defeat Israel on the battlefield. Israel would always have superior military force. So Hamas chose a different battlefield, one where the weapons were not rockets and drones, but bots, hashtags, and targeted narratives. “The messages were highly disciplined and strategic,” Kinsella said. “Hamas knew they could never beat Israel militarily. Israel would always beat them on the battlefield. What did they do instead? They started a campaign, a propaganda war to change public opinion in the west, an information war, because they knew they could win. A campaign to isolate, delegitimize, and ultimately erase the Jewish state from the map and destabilize Western democracy.” The target, he said, was not the Israeli military and not even the Jewish community first. The target was young people, especially students on campuses like Queen’s. “It was designed to capture the hearts and minds of young people. The main target was young people in places like this. And they are winning using this.” Kinsella held up his iPhone as he spoke, noting the irony that Israel, a country that had helped lead the world in technology and innovation, was now being undone by tools it had helped create. What should have been a source of national strength had become the vector for its isolation.
The data he cited made the point land hard. Kinsella pointed to a Harris poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, which found that 70 per cent of Gen Z respondents supported Hamas. He paused before adding that pollsters had privately told him the real numbers were even worse. The room shifted in its seats. That statistic was not just a number; it represented a generational shift that many in the audience had felt coming for years. Lauren Schwartz, co-president of the Jewish Law Students Association at Queen’s, was there to hear Kinsella, and she told the crowd that his assessment of her generation was painfully accurate. “Unfortunately, most people in my generation rely on TikTok and Instagram reels for information regarding the Israel-Hamas war, and misinformation is rampant,” she said. She spoke quietly but firmly, and her words hung in the air. It is one thing for a man in his sixties to warn about the dangers of social media. It is another to hear a young Jewish law student confirm that the tools her generation uses every day have become a vector for antisemitic conspiracy theories and distorted history. She did not have to convince anyone in that room of the stakes. The security presence outside, the police officer who had been shot in Belleville, the fear that had become a familiar part of Jewish life in Canada, all of that was already present. What she added was something simpler: the recognition that the fight for the future is happening in the palm of a hand, one screen at a time.
Kinsella then turned the mirror back on Canadian politics. He spoke about Prime Minister Mark Carney, who, one year ago, had stood at the United Nations and said Canada would recognize a Palestinian state, but only if the Palestinian Authority met a series of conditions: stop paying salaries to terrorists, reform governance, hold elections for the first time in twenty years, and demilitarize Palestinian territories. None of those conditions, Kinsella argued, had been met. Yet Canada went ahead and recognized Hamas-run Palestine anyway. “Why?” he asked, letting the question sit. “Why, before even one of the conditions were met?” The answer, he said, was simple: polls. “Politicians pay attention to one thing more than anything else,” he explained. “Politicians are as addicted to polls like it’s heroin.” It was a blunt and cynical assessment, but it was also an experienced one. Kinsella has spent decades in the back rooms of political campaigns, and he knows how decisions are made, especially by those who want to stay in power. He tied this political calculus directly to the broader information war, noting that Hamas’s social media campaign was not an accident or a happy accident of technology. It was well-funded and strategically directed, with support from Qatar and expertise from Al Jazeera. The goal was not just to change minds, he said, but to shape the landscape in which Western leaders made decisions, to make the cost of supporting Israel politically prohibitive. And it was working.
The evening ended closer to home. Kinsella spoke about his own battles against racism and antisemitism in Canada, including a long fight against a Toronto community newspaper that had been secretly run by neo-Nazis. He described how he had worked to expose the operation, threatening to out advertisers and others associated with it, and then turning to litigation when threats were not enough. He noted, with some bitterness, that there had been little appetite among authorities to lay hate-crime charges or pursue prosecutions. It was a reminder that the fight against antisemitism is not a distant problem or something that only happens in other countries. It is happening here, in Canadian cities, on Canadian campuses, in the pages of community newspapers and the comments sections of social media. Schwartz said she was proud that the JLSA had staged the event in the wake of the Belleville attack, but she did not hide her frustration. “It’s telling that it falls on the shoulders of Jewish students to organize this rather than have our law school openly stand up for the rights of Jewish students,” she said. The applause that followed was strong and sustained. The event was over, but no one seemed in a hurry to leave. People lingered in the aisles, speaking in low voices, exchanging numbers, promising to stay in touch. The lecture hall had been filled with a strange mix of fear, anger, and resolve. It was a night about the power of words and the damage they can do. But it was also a night about refusing to stay silent, about coming together, despite the risk, to bear witness and to fight back.