If ever there was a champion of the woke, it is the author Ta-Nehisi Coates. He worked as a journalist for years at many left-wing publications including the Village Voice, Time and The Atlantic and has written a number of books. One of his books won the National Book Award.
His latest book, The Message is principally about his view on Israel which he believes is racist to the core. He spent ten days visiting cities in the West Bank and read reports about the country from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, all organizations deeply critical of Israel to arrive at his conclusion.
His book tour took him to his favorite liberal outlets which could not heap enough praise on the author and his book.
The New York Times called Coates a “public intellectual” who could “wield his moral authority” to “call out injustice,” “especially regarding Israel and the occupied territories.” Why would the editor of a major news organization give a glowing review of someone completely unfamiliar with the region who based his entire view from talking to select individuals over ten days, and a number of publicly available jaundiced reports? That says much more about the Times than it does about the book and his analysis.
MSNBC gave him a glowing interview by a gushing Chris Hayes for sixteen minutes. Coastes called Israel an “apartheid state” which he said was immediately obvious since there were streets he could not walk down. Hayes chimed in that he agreed, having been on the “same streets and Hebron and had the same reaction which is that this is is obviously a moral abomination.” (5:20) The two of them were in violent agreement “obviously, obviously, obviously” they echoed to each other.
There was no discussion that 90 percent of Hebron is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and JEWS ARE FORBIDDEN from going there. No education that when the area was under Muslim control pre-1967, JEWS WERE FORBIDDEN from even entering their holy site of the Tomb of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs. No mention that the 1929 Arab riots which slaughtered Jews, led the British to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE ALL JEWS from the city, because the British concluded that the massacre was so savage and massive that the victims could not be protected from Muslim Arab mobs.
Coates went on to argue that Palestinian Arab voices are not heard in the media and that more talking heads should be Muslim or Arab or Palestinian to showcase their version of facts. It seems that he is unfamiliar with the reality that almost every Palestinian harbors antisemitic attitudes, with the vast majority favoring killing Jewish civilians inside Israel since 2000. American media has actually shielded Americans from the toxic violent racism of Palestinian Arabs.
Hayes accidentally let out that the two of them are friends (7:35) and talked about writing together. That fact was not a disqualifier for the executives at MSNBC which wanted Coates to have a warm and glowing interview, pushing his book.
When Hayes asked Coates why he didn’t interview anyone pro-Israel (9:20), Coates offered that “it’s very very difficult to spend almost thirty years in media as I have, and not be very much exposed – and frankly to live in America as a thinking person and not be exposed – to the defenders of the ‘Zionist Project.'” A rich criticism that Jews who control the media have continuously lied to the American public to protect their racist ‘project.’
Hayes grunted in agreement.
He went on to say that because Israel is an apartheid state, nothing else matters. He doesn’t care what actions Arabs have taken or what they say because that inherent situation is evil.
Hayes pointed his finger and waved that Coates was right on point. He urged everyone to read the book.
Coates went on to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for a 21 minute interview. Coates acknowledged the Holocaust but wrongfully concluded that Israel was founded because Jews wanted to have safety, and then Jews started acting the same way as their historic oppressors (8:00). He claimed that the Jewish case for nationalism led them to deny rights to non-Jews in Israel (10:30), a completely untrue statement, as Israel is the only nation for one thousand miles in any direction that affords minority rights.
Stewart agreed anyway.
At 11:50, Coates suggested that the Jewish State acts so bigoted and violent against Arabs because of “the humiliation of the Holocaust.” Stewart suggested (14:45) that Arabs around the Middle East were humiliated by the British and French chopping up the region post World War I. He thought the region needed to “reconcile humiliation” (16:50).
In this telling, the genocide of European Jewry was conflated with creating new nations. The extermination of six million Jews connected to the lack of a Palestinian State because the local Arabs want all of it. The return of Jews to their ancestral homeland could only be celebrated if Jews got to subjugate the people who had been living there.
If that premise were true, would Jews have accepted a partition for just part of the land in 1947? Granted all non-Jews Israeli citizenship in 1948? Handed the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest site for Judaism, to the Muslim Waqf in 1967? Every other faith group which took the plateau for the past 2,000 years converted it to paganism, a church or mosque.
Until the Jews. They handed control to Muslims in the fervent wish for peace and coexistence.
Stewart, a professed “cultural Jew”, endorsed the book.
CNN’s Amanpour & Co. interviewed Coates in an 18 minute interview. He talked (5:00) about how Palestinian Muslims had to wait as much as 45 minutes to enter the Old City of Jerusalem, while those entering from Israel were able to just walk in. Notice: that’s called border controls; Israeli Arabs have no issues going to the Old City of Jerusalem and do so constantly.
He went on to say that Israel’s laws are like the Jim Crow era of separate and unequal. He called Israel an “illegal apartheid regime (8:00)… based on what I saw and read afterwards.” But in interviews Coates made clear that he only read from parties that lambast Israel. He defends himself by saying that the context was irrelevant and the situation is intolerable and inhumane. That has the intellectual and moral idiocy of criticizing a prison without understanding the crime of someone, or the harshness of what chemotherapy does to a person without considering the cancer that riddles a person’s body.
Israel has not annexed the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL/ “West Bank”) because it hopes to arrive at a two-state settlement. It has already given Gaza and the major Arab population areas to the Palestinian Authority to give Arabs there self-determination. Unfortunately, the Arabs made clear in the Second Intifada/ Two Percent Pogrom that they want all of Israel, not just pieces of it.
The interviewer pushed back at 9:00 that Coates was only there for ten days and Jews have indigenous claims to the land too. Coates said that “context… won’t make [it] okay.” He then compared defenders of Israel to American Southern racists telling northern White people condemning slavery that “you don’t know the Negro like we do.” (11:25) Coates implied that the pro-Israel community wants to treat Arabs like Black slaves. He said that in Israeli “citizenship is decided by ethnicity and religion, and rights are decided by ethnicity and religion” (16:05) showing that he is completely misinformed and ignorant about the country, where 26% of its citizens are non-Jews.
Coates went back to his theme (17:40) “that just because you went through some horrific experience you therefore have a kind of moral authority and are therefore then not capable of inflicting hurts on other people.” Coates seemingly thinks that Jews think themselves both “humiliated’ (Daily Show) and morally superior because of the Holocaust, and can therefore act with impunity.
The basic context that Coates refuses to acknowledge is that the Holocaust wiped out one-third of global Jewry. While he thinks of himself as a minority, there are over one billion Black people in the world. There are nearly two billion Muslims in the world. Jews are not majority-minorities that are discussed constantly, but a minority-minority of just 15 million people which are on the endangered humans list. When they returned en masse to their homeland, five Arab armies and the local Arab population tried to genocide the remaining rump of Jews. In the lands that Arabs conquered in the 1948-9 war, they ethnically cleansed the land of every single Jew and gave citizenship to people as long as they weren’t Jewish (1954 Jordanian Law, Article 3). They voted Hamas with a vile genocidal antisemitic charter to 58% of the parliament, and celebrated the group’s October 7 massacre.
CNN would not endorse the speaker or book.
The firestorm over the book came about recently when CBS interviewed Coates in a six minute interview by three interviewers. One of the three, Tony Dokoupil asked Coates why he omitted so much context (1:50) and Coates replied that the pro-Israel context is known so he didn’t feel compelled to repeat them, as well as making the arguments listed above in the other interviews. The staff at CBS went ballistic at the line of questioning so CBS News chief Wendy McMahon scolded Dokoupil for not meeting “our editorial standards.”
Perhaps Dokoupil was the only journalist who actually did his job, as most “news” organizations were no more than paid advertising spots.
The shame of Coates is the willful smugness of his ignorance. The horror of the media is the willful platforming of miseducation.
Related articles:
Platforming The ‘Third Intifada’ (October 2024)
NO Country Has A Right To Exist. Israel SHOULD Exist (January 2024)
Hamas’s Willing Executioners (July 2021)
First One Through 