Ta-Nehisi Coates’s sneering pro-Israel critics are the ones who don’t get complexity
JVL Introduction
Critics of American journalist and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message has done much to expose the terrible injustice inflicted upon Palestinians by the Israeli state, have sneered that he is an outsider who doesn’t understand the complexities of the situation.
Not true, says James North in an article for Mondoweiss which we are pleased to re-publish below. Coates did his research and went to Palestine with his eyes wide open to realities concealed in the mainstream coverage available to most consumers of news.
According to Peter Beinart, who has already praised Coates for the quality of his work and the brave stance he has taken, it is those attacking Coates who block out any complexity by asserting that Israel’s aggression is nothing more than a reaction against Arab/Palestinian determination to annihilate Israeli Jews.
See or read Beinart’s Two Final Thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book here.
NWI
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Mon 14 Oct 2024. Read the original here.
Critics charge Ta-Nehisi Coates didn’t spend enough time in Palestine to learn the truth. They’re wrong.
Pro-Israel critics are panicking at the success of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, and they have honed in on an argument to discredit him that doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
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I’m sorry you didn’t share a representative quote from Coates himself instead of this piece. We could have learned much more.
It doesn’t matter what your expertise, your experience of racism, of anti-racist activism or even your public status, simply identifying the horrific nature of Israeli Apartheid will get you smeared.
Ta-Nehisi Coates now joins Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and a number of UN Special Rapporteurs in list that is already far too long. But it is everyone else that is wrong, not those justifying colonialism via religion, the IDF killing children, Netanyahu or Israel’s lobby and its self-contradictory bad faith claims.
Even the corporate media must know they’ve been expending huge amounts of resources attempting to justify the indefensible. This is about raw power, strategic interest, economic class and ethnic privilege. Therefore, the logic of equivalency, standardisation of analysis, the historic definitions of racism and anti-Semitism all go out the window. We now live in a world where the media will publish Howard Jacobson’s conjured-up reasons for hurt feelings, as mattering more, than slaughtered children.
It’s good to see the “you don’t live here or speak the language(s)” trope being given the contempt it deserves. It’s being used a lot these days. They are probably confident that few yet have the gall to mention that the most brainwashed people in history have lived under tyrannical regimes that have hijacked their identity.