The David Frum Show on The Hidden Hand: book of the week

David Frum has given me a great honour by designating The Hidden Hand as his book of the week. Here is a link to his show - the discussion of the book is at about the 50-minute mark, but I encourage you to listen to all of it, because the show is about the misuse of the word "genocide," an important theme I've written about extensively - and below are some of the things David has to say.

Thank you to David Frum for reading the book and recommending it - and to all of you who have picked it up!

"As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella, The Information War and the Rise of Anti-Semitic Propaganda, just published.

Warren Kinsella is a prominent Canadian journalist active for many years in Canadian party politics. He's a close associate of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. He has become passionately involved in recent years in Canada in the debate over the state of Israel and its detractors.

Kinsella is very much a shoe-leather journalist. He's not interested in big theories. He's interested in getting to the bottom of stories.

And The Hidden Hand is his attempt to take his microphone place by place and understand how is it that you have seen this extraordinary surge of anti-semitic propaganda on the new social media?

His big thesis is that this surge is not an organic phenomenon. It's not that thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of separate people all over the planet have spontaneously and individually decided to turn their media, social media feeds into attacks on the state of Israel.

But rather that something is happening here, driven by political actors, many of them foreign, but even more worryingly driven by the nature of social media itself. The algorithm here is taking on a kind of mind of its own, and we are all becoming the algorithm's captives, and our brain functions are becoming its product.

...That's Kinsella's story. It's a very disturbing one. I recommend the book to people want to understand what is happening and begin the work of understanding why and what to do about it."