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WASHINGTON – Marc Ginsburg shakes his head.

“These kids wouldn’t know the difference between Gaza and a bagel,” the former Ambassador says.

Ginsburg, a Clinton administration appointee, is asked if those kids – the university-and-college-level ones accusing Israel and the West of “genocide,” from Toronto to Los Angeles – could possibly be coming together spontaneously. Organically.

“No,” says Ginsburg, now the head of a Washington-based watchdog called the Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW). “No way. There’s no doubt that what Hamas had in the can was prepared weeks, weeks in advance [of October 7]. They lined up a whole bunch of influencers in Europe, United States and Canada, to push this Hamas content onto mainstream social media platforms.”

Ginsburg knows whereof he speaks. The former Ambassador to Morocco has devoted considerable effort to tracking and exposing antisemitism – and the incitement of violence against Jews – with CSW. Hamas, he says, now runs a sophisticated social media propaganda effort – one that relies on popular influencers scattered throughout the West.

There is equally no doubt that those influencers – and myriad organizers, and protestors – are being paid to show up and spew Jew hatred, Ginsburg says. Money flows in through non-profits, NGOs and charities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, he adds, from Iran, Qatar and even Russia and China.

Just hours before we met, Ginsburg spoke to a congressional committee about Iran’s efforts to destabilize democracies like America’s – and the longtime Democrat applauded the tough action the Trump administration has taken against antisemitic campus agitators, often acting at the behest of Iran, Qatar and Hamas.

Says he: “I applaud the Trump’s administration’s decision to threaten the withholding of federal grants until these universities clean up their act…[The campus anti-Israel activists] are full time and very capable. These paid disruptors are being funded. Who has charted the busses and the provided them with the transportation to go out and disrupt an airport runway or an airport roadway, to stop people from getting to an airport? This doesn’t happen because a kid who’s a freshman or sophomore says: ‘Guess what? We’re going to go out to Kennedy, to Kennedy Airport. We’re going to stop every flight, every passenger trying to make a flight.’”

The agitators, who are getting bolder, have training, resources and the backing of powerful interests, Ginsburg says. An unholy alliance of Marxist-Leninists, anarchist groups and Jew-haters have increasingly come together to promote violence and enmity towards Jews, he says.

In a shocking report prepared in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric 2023 attack on Israeli civilians, CSW revealed:

• Hamas, Iran and Qatar “had a sophisticated social media plan ready to Spring” on October 7
• On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, the anti-Israel forces worked to “generate support for Hamas [and] leverage foreign social media influencers” to assist
• While protests on university campuses and in Western streets may have “appeared organic,” they were in fact “professionally staffed and funded”
• After October 7, those extremist groups – drawn heavily from leftist, Muslim and anarchistic circles – formed a new “axis of antisemitism”

Ginsburg points to the example of one Canadian group that was recently designated as a terrorist entity by the governments of Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. Again shaking his head, Ginsberg says he and his colleagues at CSW spent years trying to convince the Trudeau and Biden administrations to act against Vancouver’s Samidoun, which was a front for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“With the Biden administration, you could’ve hit them over the head with a 2 x 4, but they were always dragging their feet…and the Canadian government was dragging its feet a lot longer,” says Ginsburg, adding: “Canada has become a petri dish for antisemitism.”

Tough words, particularly when you consider they are coming from a Democrat and an appointee of Bill Clinton’s administration. But anyone who has looked at the evidence knows that Mark Ginsberg is right.

So, will political candidates in Canada, now in the midst of a hotly-contested election campaign, heed his words?

They should. They must, before it’s too late.

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My plane from Washington landed just as Donald Trump’s tariffs were hitting. The plane was on time. So was he.

Will things be as bad as the economists are prognosticating? Well, yes. Things are about to get very bad.

**

I was in the States because we were shooting a documentary near and around the U.S. Capitol yesterday. For some of it, The film crew shot B roll of me loitering near the Canadian Embassy. At one point, I muttered something to myself, like old guys do, and one of the crew asked me what I’d said.

“Poilievre won’t ever be boss of this place,” I said. They looked puzzled. “Never mind,” I said.

In the coming days after Canadians vote, Conservative spin meisters will flood the air waves saying that “no one predicted” Trudeau leaving, Trump winning, tariffs arriving.

But, um, that won’t be true, will it?

Some of us had been saying, for months, that Trudeau would depart. Weeks before the vote, I said that Kamala Harris was losing, too. Equally, Your Humble Narrator volunteered for Harris in the U.S. and every day – every day – Trump would talk about his tariffs plan. Every day.

I wasn’t the only one making these predictions. Others did, too. They weren’t radical opinions.

That’s what makes the likely coming defeat of Pierre Poilievre so politically unforgivable. The Tories had time to get ready, and make changes to the strategy.

And they didn’t.

**

Getting ready is 99% of the job in politics. The Conservatives didn’t get ready. Like all conservatives, they prefer stability and constancy. But we live in a world where those things don’t really exist anymore. Hats off, Mr. Trump.

There were things that the Conservative campaign could’ve done months before the vote. Here are my top three.

**

Before Doug Ford became a regular on the American news TV circuit, Pierre Poilievre could have – and should have – done the same damn thing.

Americans have only a passing acquaintance with the pecking order in Canadian politics. For example, when they hear that you work for a Canadian Senator, they actually think it’s a Senator like one of theirs: you know, elected and therefore legitimate.

Appearing on American TV with the title of “Canadian Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” would’ve commanded Jake Tapper’s attention. And Pierre could have gone on there and told the gospel truth: “Donald Trump isn’t a real conservative, Jake. He believes in interfering in the markets, in the private sector, and in peoples lives. Real conservatives don’t do those things.”

Would Poilievre have ever done that? Of course not. But he needed to create a lot of light between themselves and Trump, months ago.

He didn’t.

**

The next thing that Team Blue needed to have done is to remember the only thing I really learned in law school. They needed to always ask them themselves this question: “What if I’m wrong?”

As in, what if they were wrong about Justin Trudeau leaving? A majority of them had convinced themselves that the former Liberal leader was an idiot and a narcissist, and he would never ever quit.

Well, there’s no disputing that he was a narcissist. But he was no idiot. He beat three capable Conservative leaders in a row, and he knew, in his tiny black heart, that the jig was up.

In 1992, when I was running the very first War Room in Canadian politics, we asked ourselves that question a lot: what if we’re wrong? We figured Mulroney would go, but we weren’t certain who would replace him. So we assigned Kim Campbell to me, Jean Charest to Marc Laframboise, and so on and so on. All of us knew every single thing all of those people had said and done going back to high school.

We were ready, in other words.

The Poilievre Tories have given us every indication that they weren’t ready for the rapid ascension of Mark Carney. At all. They let him define himself before they could define him.

The China stuff, for example. My War Room would’ve been all over that like ravenous dogs on a bone. The Poilievre Conservatives, meanwhile, treat like it’s a meme.

The memes are funny. But the subject matter is serious, too.

Again: they didn’t do that.

**

The third and final thing that Pierre Poilievre could have done was to promote the living hell out of his plan to respond to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Because, make no mistake: Poilievre has the better plan to deal with them. In particular, he doesn’t believe that it’s good economic policy to leave Canadian energy resources in the ground. Like Carney clearly does.

If Poilievre had done that – even on the aforementioned Tapper show – it would’ve paid two big dividends. It would have shown him championing Canada to the Americans. And it would have shown him as The Guy With A Plan.

He didn’t do that, either. Like too many people – not just conservatives, he kept hoping that the tariff stuff was a bad dream that we would all wake up from.

It wasn’t a dream.

**

Nor, now, is what is happening in this election campaign. It ain’t a dream. The polls tell the real story, not snapshots of big campaign rallies. And the real story is that the Conservatives are losing.

Can they snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? Yes they can. Absolutely. Just for starters, in the debates, Pierre Poilievre can say the things that I have recommended he say about Trump.

Will he? Of course not. No one ever listens to me.

Sure is good to be home, however.

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