L’affaire Dokoupil: Is Ta-Nehisi Coates deeply ignorant, a bigoted antisemite, or both?
A rhetorical question. Obviously he's a bigoted antisemite.
ICYMI – which I doubt anyone reading this had done – a week or so ago Ta-Nehisi Coates was a guest on CBS Mornings, flogging his new, already-a-bestseller, book The Message. And if anyone reading this doesn’t know who Coates is (an even less likely possibility), he’s the multiple award winning author (including a MacArthur “genius” grant) of several highly influential books focusing on race relations and the experience of being Black in America. His earlier bestseller Between The World and Me, was described (quite accurately, I would say) as having become “a sacred text among progressives”.
During that CBS interview, Tony Dokoupil, one of the CBS Mornings hosts, challenged Coates regarding the content of a lengthy section of his new book focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Coates has a history of hating Israel – having learned his hatred at the knees of his deeply antisemitic father, who is somewhat infamous for having promulgated the calumny that Jews are to blame for the Atlantic slave trade.
Dokoupil was not the first to highlight egregious bias, factual errors, and gross sins of omission in this section of Coates’ book. Coleman Hughes basically eviscerated Coates’ writings about Israel and Palestine in a well-researched and cogently argued review published in The Free Press titled The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and subtitled ‘The Message,’ is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. There is also an excellent twitter thread by “Aizenberger55" that takes Coates to task for his many errors of both commission and omission.
But while the takedowns of Coates by Hughes and Aizenberger55 (and others, like David Harsanyi of the Washington Examiner in an article titled Israel: The racist protocols of Ta-Nehisi Coates , Chris Beck, writing in Splice Today, and Jesse Singal) did not garner a huge amount of attention, the mere fact that Dokoupil asked Coates a challenging question produced an immediate firestorm of protest within the insulated elite world of CBS News. What followed was a public rebuking of Dokoupil by the head of CBS News and a struggle session during which a tearful Dokoupil made somewhat of an apology for any harm his actions might have caused.
This response by CBS News has generated a LOT of commentary in the media, much of it unflattering. Typical of many of the comments were tweets by Jonah Goldberg
This story is in some ways more damaging for @cbsnews than the Dan Rather memogate scandal. That was largely perceived as primarily a Dan Rather scandal. This has revealed the institution. It’s a window on the creepy pettiness of internal bureaucratic ideological commissars. And all of this in defense of Coates and the hurt feelings of super fan staffers who can’t process the idea that he’s not some frick’n oracle.
and Ron Lindsay
CBS reporter Tony Dokoupil interviewed Coates on his new book, The Message. And then the message Dokoupil received from CBS brass was "How dare you ask beloved Black icon Ta-Nehisi Coates anything other than softball questions!"
You can read some other commentaries on the CBS News brouhaha at any or all of the links below:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/10/10/thursday-hili-dialogue-509/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/business/media/coates-dokoupil-cbs-mornings.html
One element of this event that seems to me to have received surprisingly little attention is what Coates actually said in response to Dokoupil’s questioning; accordingly, I wanted to offer a few comments of my own on Coates’ answers :).
What Dokoupil asked Coates was:
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada. . . the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”
Dokoupil also twice asked Coates whether he believes Israel has a right to exist, and:
“What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”
Rather than answering directly, Coates first deflected:
“Well, what I would say is that the perspective that you just outlined – there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. I am concerned always with those who don’t have a voice. “
Coates went on to say that his goal was to give voice to narratives that he feels are not often present in American main stream media, and then, in response to the questions about Israel’s right to exist and his focus on the world’s only Jewish state, he stated:
“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state; I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are. Either apartheid is right or wrong. It’s really, really simple.”
OK. A few observations about this interchange.
First. NOTHING about the situation in the Middle East is “really really simple”.
Second — let’s be very clear. Coates’ response regarding apartheid and states built on ethnocracy is absolute horseshit. In the entire world there is exactly ONE Jewish state – surrounded on all sides by deeply ethnocratic MUSLIM states. But Coates did not voice a whisper about Saudi Arabia. Or Syria. Or Lebanon. Or the Muslim domination of Gaza. Or Egypt. Or Libya. Or the attempts at ethnic cleansing of Sudan by Muslim militants. Or Iraq. Or Iran. And what about the separation of Northern Ireland into Catholic vs Protestant sections? Or perhaps Coates could have talked about Indonesia, or India, or Pakistan. But no. There is only ONE country in the whole world where peoples of a particular religion predominate that Coates cares to vent his bile against, and that’s the world’s one JEWISH state, Israel.
Moreover, his claims regarding “apartheid” are ridiculous. The truth is, Muslims (and Christians and Hindus and Bahais etc. etc.) have full freedom to practice their faiths in Israel. There is far more freedom of religion in Israel than in ANY country in the large colonialist Muslim world.
The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is an easily debunked myth, promulgated by those who oppose Israel’s existence.
“Apartheid” is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness” and applies to the system of racial segregation in place in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. This was a clear, institutional, and legal separation of white, black, and mixed-raced peoples in South Africa for whom there were segregated benches, parks, beaches, stores, bathrooms, water fountains, schools, etc.
In contrast, Israel is a democratic state, where all minorities receive equal protection under the law. Alongside Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis vote, study, work, live, and serve in Parliament, the courts, the military, and government. “
Further – what Coates is quite explicitly saying is that it doesn’t matter if anything he says about Israel and the Israel/Palestine conflict is actually true – and he has no interest in understanding and writing about why Israel has taken the actions that it has taken in an attempt to defend itself from those whose goal is to eliminate it and to cleanse the entire region of all Jews. His explicit, unapologetic goal is to present the views of those who, like him, hate Israel and wish to see its elimination. Coates openly acknowledges that his goal in writing that section of the book is to convince his readers that in the Middle East, Jews are oppressors while Muslims are the oppressed, and to convince his readers of the unique illegitimacy of the state of Israel as a sovereign state. Accuracy and fairness in the presentation of information are not secondary to his main goals — they are, to him, not goals at all.
One might say that Coates is being deliberately disingenuous in unapologetically making his many false claims about Israel. But given his stature, and his openness about his goals, disingenuous is far too mild a word to describe what he has taken on as his task here. He’s a shamelessly and unapologetically antisemitic Israel-hating propogandist bigot – and has even become an apologist for the horrific massacres of Oct. 7 — and he’s particularly vile and dangerous in this regard, because of his appeal to so many liberals and progressives. It is terrifying to think how he might move the needle of public opinion even further toward support for genocidal death cults and away from support for the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Thank you Robert for not pussyfooting around the ugly truth:
"He’s a shamelessly and unapologetically antisemitic Israel-hating propagandist bigot – and has even become an apologist for the horrific massacres of Oct. 7 — and he’s particularly vile and dangerous in this regard, because of his appeal to so many liberals and progressives."
Good summary.