We all know that on October 7, 2023, Hamas unleashed an invasion and attack on Israel that was as barbaric as attacks from medieval times, and on a scale unseen since the Holocaust. Less known is that on that very same date, in tandem, Hamas launched an online propaganda war that was similar in sophistication to the highest level modern political campaign, and, “when measured by views and engagement … at a level no one had ever seen before.”
Warren Kinsella’s book “The Hidden Hand” tells the story of that propaganda campaign.
While Hamas lost its battle on the ground, its propaganda campaign has been hugely successful. “It actually is a well-organized, well-financed, and professionally run political-style propaganda campaign,” Kinsella explains. He then goes on to expose it.
It’s hard to reconcile the image of the medieval savages who committed the most sadistic acts on October 7 with an image of the highly competent, tech-savvy political operation that Kinsella describes. And yet, the results of that operation are clear to see, and compelling evidence of what he outlines. Perhaps that contradiction is why so many missed it as it was happening.
Kinsella shows that Hamas put enormous resources into its propaganda campaign, with fifteen hundred operatives working on propaganda and a network of fake social media accounts, many created before the actual invasion, between July and October of 2023. Those accounts were amplified by an online infrastructure that had been built up by Russia, China, and Iran, which both distributed fake news, and attacked and vandalized pro-Israel accounts and pages.
Many of us have been flummoxed over the past three years as we have watched pro-Hamas partisans denying the very atrocities that Hamas itself filmed and broadcast on October 7. Kinsella confirms that this was a deliberate, “binary communications strategy.” One message was sent out to excite the Hamas base. Knowing, however, that this violence would alienate the westerners whose support they needed, they engaged another strategy for that audience: denial that was modeled after Holocaust denial.
Unlike the original Holocaust deniers, however, the October 7 deniers were able to “turbocharge their denial by adding algorithms and hashtags and bot farms.” Because they had been “quietly laying the groundwork online for years…. [and] knew October 7 was going to happen before it did,” they were able to spring quickly into action, reaching “millions of people in multiple languages.”
Kinsella notes, “denying acts of violence against Jews is as old as Judaism itself.”
Gen Z westerners were targeted with the assistance of bot farms such as the Russian “Internet Research Agency.” These campaigns used the same type of “segmentation marketing” that sophisticated political campaigns and large corporations use, sending out different messages on different platforms based on years’ of research that had been done prior to October 7, 2023. These fake profiles and bot armies also algorithmically boosted content from Qatar-sponsored Al Jazeera. The consumers of these online campaigns were made more vulnerable to it due to collapsing trust in mainstream media.
Even the Microsoft Threat Analysis Team, which Kinsella quotes at length, recognized, “As the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7, 2023, Iran immediately surged support to Hamas with its now well-honed technique of combining targeted hacks with influence operations amplified on social media, what we refer to as cyber-enabled influence operations…. Influence operations grew increasingly sophisticated and inauthentic, deploying networks of social media ‘sockpuppets’ as the war progressed…. Eventually, Iran turned its cyberattacks and influence operations against Israel’s political allies and economic partners to undermine support to Israel’s military operations.”
Videos that were sent out for Arab and Muslim audiences, meanwhile, not only showed Hamas’s acts against Israel, they were also designed to portray Hamas as compassionate, depicting them, for example, as kind to Israeli children. These are, at least in part, the videos that have caused so many to have favorable views of Hamas.
The book is thorough and, in addition to its revelations about social media manipulation, it also details the news reporting problems with which most FTI readers will already be familiar: anti-Israel NGOs affecting coverage, Hamas intimidation of reporters, the co-opting of the U.N. and seemingly neutral organizations such as Reporters without Borders.
The protests that sprang up immediately after the October 7 attack, which gave the appearance of having been planned prior to Hamas’s attack, are covered as well. Kinsella has a chapter that discusses the funding of these protests, including Iranian involvement in funding and organizing them. In at least one case in Canada, direct evidence surfaced that the protesters were being directly paid.
He also demonstrates the coordination among the campus protests, and the connection of the protesters with Hamas and American Muslims for Palestine. “Within hours of the attack on Israel,” Kinsella writes, “Hamas issued a worldwide call. It ordered its allies to commence pushing out disinformation and denial, and to start spreading chaos and division throughout the West.”
The campus protests, he demonstrates, were an answer to that call. Anti-Israel student groups, Kinsella shows, have functioned as “Hamas’s propaganda team.” And the use of language in those protests, such as calling Israel’s self-defense “genocide,” or the claim that the protesters were trying to “free” Palestine, was coordinated and deliberate.
Kinsella is a Canadian lawyer and columnist who has written eleven books. There were a small number of minor errors in The Hidden Hand, but none that affected its thesis. As one example, Kinsella states that the number of Israeli children murdered on October 7 was 19; it was actually close to double that. The biggest problem with the book is that many of his recommendations for how to address these problems would not pass Constitutional muster in the U.S., though they may be feasible in Kinsella’s native Canada. We must rigorously enforce material support for terror laws and hate crimes laws, and social media companies should continue to do their best to purge what are known as “bot” accounts. Hate speech, however, is generally protected speech in the U.S. Here, we must abide by the adage that the answer to bad speech is good speech, and we need much, much more of it.
Still, the book is thoroughly researched. Kinsella interviewed dozens of reputable sources on the record. Many of them will be names FTI readers will likely recognize, others may be more obscure subject matter experts.
October 7, 2023 was more than an attack on the ground, as horrific as the invasion was. It was also a global call to action against the Jews.
As I wrote in April 2024,
The Hamas attack on Israel was a signal to antisemites everywhere: It’s open season on the Jews.
This played out in the weeks that followed: In October [2023] New York’s Second Avenue Deli was vandalized, as were, in November, Jewish-owned shops in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Also in November, the president of AIPAC had his home smoke-bombed and vandalized, a synagogue and a JCC in Montreal were attacked with firebombs, two Jewish schools in Montreal were attacked with gunshots, and a school in Indiana was attacked in the mistaken belief that it was Jewish. That same month a teacher in a New York City high school had to hide from a mob of antisemitic students in her own school.
Kinsella has done extremely important work, giving us the nuts and bolts of how that call to action was executed.
While the war on the ground may be over, three years since Hamas’s horrific invasion, the work to get the truth out is just beginning. Kinsella’s book is essential reading for everyone involved in trying to do this work.
