The Whig's Gare Joyce on my Queen's talk
Warren Kinsella (right) speaks to an audience member holding a copy of The Hidden Hand, the recently published book by the political consultant, lawyer and columnist. Kinsella spoke about Hamas's disinformation campaign to an audience of 150 gathered on the Queen's campus in Kingston on Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. (Photo by GARE JOYCE/KINGSTON WHIG-STANDARD)
By Gare Joyce
As political events and book tours go, Warren Kinsella’s appearance on Queen’s University’s campus generated a large audience to a lecture hall Monday, unusually large considering the location wasn’t disclosed until 90 minutes before the doors opened.
The heightened security came in the wake of the attack at a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue in Belleville, Ont., last week, which led to the death of the gunman and life-threatening wounds to a police officer providing security outside.
More than 150 people fairly filled the room to hear Kinsella, a firebrand political consultant, lawyer and journalist (for Postmedia most recently), and while precise demographics weren’t available, the majority weren’t current students.
Though a few families came out, as did members of the Jewish Law Students Association that invited Kinsella, most in attendance were decades removed from their college days and would have heard about the lecture through the B’nai Brith and other organizations that supported the JSLA. Likely the average age of his audience this night was lowered by those who live-streamed the event online.
The lecture was promoted as Truth on Trial: Information Warfare, Democracy and the Rule of Law, and Kinsella focused on Hamas and the terror organization’s influence of public opinion and capture of political favour in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that killed killing at least 1,195 people during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.
Penguin Random House Canada published Kinsella’s latest book this spring, The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda. He also produced and narrated a documentary, The Campaign: Disinformation in a Time of War, that seized on the same themes.
Rather than a reading of an excerpt of screening of clips from the documentary, Kinsella spoke extemporaneously about the rise of anti-Israeli sentiment and stoking of antisemitic fires.
Kinsella, who served as a key adviser to former Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien and worked on political campaigns “from California to Israel,” so it was almost with professional envy as well as disgust that he laid out the roll-out of Hamas’s sophisticated messaging apparatus. Within minutes of the attack, while Hamas was still in Israel, thousands of bots on social media were ramped up, disinformation and propaganda landing with hundreds of millions on platforms worldwide — not so much convenient selection of facts or even conflations and distortions, but fabrications, whole-cloth fictional 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 that they knew they could win. A campaign to isolate, delegitimize, and ultimately erase the Jewish state from the map and destabilize Western democracy.
“It was designed to capture the hearts and minds of young people. Main target was young people in places like (Queen’s). They are winning using this.”
At this point, Kinsella held up an iPhone. He’d later note the irony of Israel, a leader in the development of technology, being undone by some of the innovations that sourced to the nation. The misinformation campaign hit the mark with unbelievable speed and efficiency — Kinsella cited a Harris poll in the almost immediate wake of the Oct. 7 attacks that found 70 per cent of the Gen Z demographic support Hamas. He also said that pollsters privately confided to him that the numbers “were much worse.”
To Lauren Schwartz, co-president of the JLSA at Queen’s, Kinsella’s read of both the student-aged demographic and the mechanism of opinion shaping was regrettably on the mark.
“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.
Winning those hearts and minds were not a goal, as Kinsella pointed out, but a means to an end, which is political influence, and he pointed to Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“One year ago, he went to the United Nations and said Canada was going to recognize the Palestinian state (only if the Palestinian authority) stopped their pay-to-slay-Jews program, reform governance there, have elections for the first time in 20 years, and demilitarize Palestine,” Kinsella said. “Not one of those conditions has been met, but he recognized Hamas-run Palestine anyway.
“Why? Why, before even one of the conditions were met?”
Kinsella reduced it to one word: polls.
“(Politicians) pay attention to one thing more than anything else,” he said. “Politicians are as addicted to polls like it’s heroin.”
Simple awareness of the Hamas misinformation campaign is to Kinsella’s mind the first step to claw back opinion.
While he dedicated most of his time to the global issues, including the financing of Hamas’s social media campaign by Qatar and the expertise sourced to Al-Jazeera, Kinsella spoke at some length about fights against racism and antisemitism much closer to home, including taking on and taking down a Toronto community newspaper that was covertly an operation back by neo-Nazis — first by threatening to out advertisers and others associated with the newspaper, then by litigation, receiving no support for to charge or prosecute hate-speech crimes.
Schwartz said she was proud that the JLSA staged the event in the wake of the Belleville attack.
“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.
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