World War Z

“I believe her.” I have always said that. I believe her. Against lies. Against disinformation. Against hate. Why? Because I inherently related to the plight of silenced women, for I am a Jew who fights for my homeland.

A few weeks ago, a box arrived from Random House with books. At the risk of embarrassing myself by incessantly posting everywhere about the first one of the books that I picked out: you must buy and inhale a copy of The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella. If I could, and believe me I want to, I would anonymously Amazon it to people who no longer speak to me. I have notoriously defended female celebrities against torrential tirades of the same disinformation war tactics that are no longer targeting individuals, but civilization. As I predicted they would. Kinsella is a non-Jewish Canadian journalist, and with the state of play the fact he is not a Jew is - fortunately or unfortunately - a greater source of credibility. The Hidden Hand is the book I have been waiting for, since long before October 7, 2023.

In May 2021, I wrote a piece for Tablet titled “The Social Media Pogrom”; which has been quoted in Congress, and features in Representative Elise Stefanik’s 2026 book Poisoned Ivies about the rise of Jew hate on American college campuses. “The Social Media Pogrom” identified what I anticipated at the time was the first big dress rehearsal for an anti-Israel, anti-West, anti-America propaganda campaign that is unlike anything the world has ever seen before, assisted by automated “bot” accounts on social media, across TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (Instagram and Facebook). I had noted how social media was attempting to completely erase and disappear one side of the narrative: the side of truth, as spoken by Jewish advocates for Israel, and how that was then correlating to a shocking rise in violent attack against Jews all over the world in the streets:

Two weeks ago, as Westerners began educating themselves about Sheikh Jarrah and the Iron Dome through stick figures with biased speech bubbles on the Diet Prada and Refinery29 Instagram feeds, something else started happening on social media. I coined it the world’s first social media pogrom. The activity that Jews—Zionist Jews in particular—experienced all over the web was bizarre at best and invalidating, abusive, and dehumanizing at worst. Zionist Jews weren’t just being unfollowed for advocating for themselves and their brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we were also losing access to direct message and comment abilities, having posts removed for violating community guidelines (while blatant antisemitism online almost never receives the same treatment), and having our accounts threatened with temporary suspension or closure.

The cherry on top, of course, was that we were simultaneously fighting off a barrage of thousands upon thousands of troll comments and hateful direct messages, which frequently included homophobic, misogynistic, and extremely violent language. Some people even generously took the time to record voice messages. I received a few of those, including one from a woman with a British accent calling for my family to burn in hell. She sang it. Or she tried to.

The seeds of this pogrom have been sown for a while. Online, there are different degrees of erasure and exclusion. First comes the unfollow, which hurts, especially from those we consider friends, those we love and cherish, whose memories are still fresh. Sometimes an unfollow is the result of pressure from other online users who dox people they disagree with. Sometimes an unfollow is a decision taken with complete autonomy, someone deciding to simply delete a person from their timeline rather than ask for clarification or, God forbid, pursue a fair-minded discussion.

If you’re a Zionist, you are not deemed worthy of dialogue. Most people who think this couldn’t give you a working definition of Zionism. They just know which labels are accepted by the intersectional world, and which labels are not. Anti-Zionism good. Zionism bad. Except Zionism is a globally recognized concept, whereas anti-Zionism doesn’t seem to have an agreed-upon definition. It exists only as a knee-jerk rejection of a belief in the State of Israel and anyone’s justification of its existence, regardless of how reasoned, empathetic, or fair-minded that justification might be.

The response to the piece’s publication proved its point. Overwhelmingly leftist progressives and hardcore Islamists (who form today’s Red-Green Islamo-Marxist alliance) attacked the work so much that my “hate name” (Eve Fartlow) became the Number 2 trending topic on X that day within an hour perhaps of publication, largely helped by Seth Rogen, who tweeted a fart emoji at me. I had met Rogen in passing years prior at a charity event he held annually with his once best friend James Franco.

Behind the trend of my hate name at Number 3 was a school shooting in San Diego.

After that day, in mid May of 2021, I understood that progressives are not friends of truth, of decency, of human rights, or of peace. I understood that they were idiots.

Suddenly my phone was ringing off the hook.

“Dude…” came a text from Ari Ingel, Executive Director of Creative Community for Peace, a non-profit entertainment industry organization. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL called me to ask me to explain what was happening. I was frozen at my kitchen table, looking at the ticker on the trending topic increase. Thousands of tweets. I saw people I thought were friends, who I had spoken to only weeks prior, join in retweeting puerile jokes about me, ensuring that everyone knew they shunned me, and we were no more. They may as well have sent a press release out to say: EVE BARLOW IS ABSOLUTELY NOT MY FRIEND. The noise was growing louder and louder on the screen but I was sitting on the other side of it next to the quiet hum of the refrigerator, and my own demise. My mind understood. My mind recognized. My mind was surprisingly calm. My body, however, was paralyzed.

The ‘90s alternative band Eve6 changed their Twitter handle to my hate name. American cartoonist Eli Valley published an antisemitic cartoon of me. Rolling Stone’s current feature star Hasan Piker was compiling YouTube videos where he relished in mocking my Scottish accent for no intelligent reason beyond clickbait. There was a maelstrom of GIFs suddenly circulating of my face distorted, my nose enlarged like you see in the Holocaust museums of Nazi Germany depictions of Jews, of me as the Gollum character in Lord Of The Rings. Google it. You’ll see. I have not Googled myself since 2019. There were now fabricated tweets of me saying abjectly racist things circulating — tweets that were doctored, that I’d never written. All of it everywhere. To this day, it is everywhere.

I knew instantaneously that this was it. I knew my life as I knew it was completely over. I was exposing them, and I was right so they had to make an example out of me. They had to suppress me. I exposed them. I exposed the Social Media Pogrom. I knew what was happening. I felt it in my body. I spoke it with my words. I recognized the pattern. I saw it happening to women during #MeToo. I knew what it was. It was happening to all of us now. They were trying to suppress me. They were silencing me. They are still silencing me.

But.

I was right. I was right. I was right.

The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella is the proof, landing in my lap five years later. He terrifyingly lays out how Islamist terror groups from the Middle East have weaponized the internet early, even before social media was invented. Al Qaeda was running its own online servers on the world wide web from the Internet’s nascence, and they recruited the West, they recruited the new generations. We learn finally that the inversion of truth, the rise of propaganda slogans like “from the river to the sea”, the libels spread about Israel, Jews and Zionism in the Gaza war, etc are all a result of a catastrophic online smear campaign by far left, far right, and Islamic extremists.

It was grown decades before the October 7 massacre, normalized in a mainstream media that had long already dumped journalism for activism due to dwindling profit, adopted by elite universities via terror-affiliated student groups such as Students For Justice In Palestine (SJP), and rubber-stamped by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who have received eye-watering donations from nefarious sources overseas. How is that even legal, one wonders. Kinsella explores the origins of the antizionists’ hate language. I doubt that any of the Palestinian flag emojis, or the watermelon earrings, or the upside down red triangle fans know the origins of the slur “Zio”. It was started by a man named David Duke. The guy who rebranded the KKK into a major political movement. When the horseshoe comes to life… Among Gen Z, Jew hate and antizionism went viral, as soon as the Covid pandemic hit in February of 2020.

And then came October 7; the tinderbox moment, setting all the kegs of gasoline that had been set about the forest of Western civilization ablaze.

In Gaza itself where cellphone usage is almost 100% (one of the highest percentages globally), the “reports” from on the ground during the war were constantly uploaded to social media without any scrutiny from the Western media that would then share it as fact. The videos would be uploaded to TikTok, and TikTok’s algorithm was totally skewered towards Hamas. “#IStandWithIsrael got two million views. Meanwhile #IStandWithPalestine got an extraordinary 37.7 million views – almost twenty times as many,” Kinsella reports. TikTok was being viewed more than all of American traditional media combined, and that was a trend that had begun during Covid. And lest I remind you: TikTok is Chinese. The Chinese don’t consider Hamas terrorists.

YouTube has also been one of the worst offenders, surprise surprise. Its model has always relied on users being on the site for longer, which perfectly aligns with Hamas’s requirements. For YouTube that equates to profit. For Hamas it equates to radicalization.

“Cyabra, CyberWell, and ISD all reported that online antisemitism proliferated after October 7, in what looked like a highly coordinated way. And, when measured by views and engagement, the propaganda - anti-Israel, anti-West, antisemitic and pro-Hamas - was at a level no one had ever seen before.”

Immediately after October 7 prepared disinformation bots were activated first in the Arab word, and then in the English-speaking world to push that the massacre was justified. Agitators in the West were paid thousands a week to protest, to aggravate, to proliferate pro Hamas, pro regime rhetoric. Even Wikipedia was the target of pro-Hamas hackers and editors who were rewriting history as it was unfolding. From the Qatar-owned AlJazeera to the Hamas-infiltrated Associated Press, Hamas dominated the global narrative and Israel’s voice was non-existent.

Most chillingly for me, Kinsella identifies that Hamas admits to targeting anti-Hamas activists by “neutralizing them” and “damaging their reputation”. They would seek to damage the public image of people fighting the truth, people like me, like us. This is the segment of Chapter 3 that I want to plaster all over the world:

Hamas used a bot army to build the Free Palestine movement and DARVO the Jews.

As I’ve written before, there’s a one-word definition for antisemitism: libel. The libels of this propaganda machine have all fallen apart in recent months. The genocide libel. The apartheid libel. The starvation libel. The killing of journalists libel. No matter the International Court Of Justice is years away from any decisive judgment on South Africa’s Qatari-backed lawfare claim that Israel is committing a genocide. No matter that the The UN’s own data now shows all of these lies to be what they are: libel. See the latest UNICEF figures on child malnutrition worldwide. Gaza’s child malnutrition rates are as low as *checks notes* Germany’s. And yet, the disinformation war has been so successful, the inevitable truth has become a footnote.

I noticed a piece at the end of last week about Zohran Mamdani’s use of bots. It is suspected he has used hundreds of bot accounts on X have to pump his messaging into millions of feeds, some posting more than 900 times a day. The accounts are often no more than three days old, with zero followers, doing nothing but re-posting Mamdani’s propaganda. Analysts have been reported in The Jerusalem Post to having determined that the IP trail leads back to City Hall itself. Thank you to journalist Mathilda Heller for staying on this story.

As I mentioned in the opening of this piece, the same bot campaign strategies used to attack individual celebrities in Hollywood (Blake Lively, arguably, Amber Heard, definitely), are also being used to promote Marxist-Islamist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, and the call is once again coming from inside the house. We warned you that what starts with female victims of online abuse doesn't end with us. When I saw Mamdani’s glossily produced antizionist Instagram video vilifying Israel two weeks ago receive eight million likes overnight, my body knew what was going on, and I wrote this urgent piece. “I’ve seen this before”, I thought. This is a social media-assisted DARVO playbook used by violent infiltrators. And it wound up putting a Jewish man in hospital after he was stabbed with a screwdriver the next day on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Allahu Akbar” screamed his attacker.

This is what’s extra depressing. Before the entire West was captured by TikTok et al on October 7, the path to peace in the Middle East had never been more hopeful. Weeks before 10/7, the word was that Saudi Arabia would be joining the Abraham Accords, furthering a trend of years of normalization between Arab nations and Israel. The Islamic Regime of Iran was due to be isolated, alongside Qatar and Turkey. On October 7, the path to peace was destroyed. Not by Israel. By Hamas, the Islamic regime and its global propaganda war. All those who preach that Zionists and Israel were the barrier to peace are bad faith actors. Israel left Gaza 20 years prior. Israel knew Gaza would receive billions of dollars in financial aid and Gaza’s leaders were left with the agency to use that aid as they pleased. They used it to go to war with Israel first and the West second, and to kill the dream of a two state solution.

So now I just have one question for everyone who left, who walked out, who created distance, who believed libels about their Jewish friends or the Jewish nation we defend, who fell victim to a world-sweeping historic propaganda machine that is truly unprecedented, one that attacks not just Israel but every single individual voice who defends her: What if you were the one being lied to? What if you were wrong? Would you say sorry? Would you correct yourself?

(Oh and I was right about Hasan Piker, too, by the way. Not that Rolling Stone care. They do have form writing puff pieces about vigilante males, though.)

Warren, thank you for your work. I hope everyone reads your book. Everywhere.

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