Ta-Nehisi Coates is someone I’ve written about several times before. I refer you to the first three posts on the list that can be found here. In my opinion, his works are vile – and all the more vile because he cloaks his hatred in a smoothly literary style.
His latest work has focused his bile on Israel and Jews. He has accomplished the astounding feat of writing on the subject as though he just dropped in from Mars, because he omits any mention of Hamas, 10/7, or Arab terrorism from his book. Here’s a review by Coleman Hughes:
And here’s another review, if you prefer reading to watching a fairly lengthy video. An excerpt:
Though a talented writer who styles himself as a journalist, Coates mostly pens words about himself and his personal impressions of the world without bothering much with grounding his work in facts or trying to place his ideas in a context that tells more than one narrow side of a story. Indeed, he is someone who thinks writers and journalists should not be seeking to tell both sides of complex stories, believing that they should boil everything down to conform to simplistic left-wing conclusions, whether accurate or not. That is exactly how toxic ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality work. …
[Coates’] entire personal experience on this topic [of Israel and Palestine] consists of a single 10-day trip to “Palestine” from which he extrapolated not just 150 pages of text but a series of damning conclusions.
For Coates, everything he saw in “Palestine”—whether on Palestinian-guided tours of places like Hebron or even time spent in Haifa or Tel Aviv—was a reflection of the historical American experience of “Jim Crow” discrimination. Woke ideologues falsely analogize the Palestinian war to destroy Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. In this way, Coates superimposes his own beliefs about an America that is an irredeemably racist nation onto the complex conflict between Jews and Arabs over possession of the land of Israel. The fact that the conflict isn’t racial doesn’t matter because to speak of this reality would prevent him from painting a largely fictional picture of a Jewish state he would like to see destroyed.
Coates dismisses Zionism as mere colonialism. He does this in part by misconstruing the writing of Zionist founding fathers who used the word in a very different way than he does or by simply falsely claiming that Israel’s birth was somehow the work of imperialism rather than by an act of what can only be fairly described as decolonization. …
Jewish rights and Jewish history aren’t so much misinterpreted as denied altogether. …
Those Israelis who are not identifiably “white”—whether they are part of the Mizrachi majority, meaning from other countries in the Mediterranean or Arab Mideast, or Ethiopians—are merely the moral equivalent of blacks who served the Confederacy or Jim Crow governments with no legitimacy as part of a people returned to their homeland.
Equally telling is his view that the Palestinians, who play the role of oppressed former slaves in his personal psychodrama version of the Middle East, have no agency, and their actions don’t matter.
Hard as it may be to imagine, his book never mentions terrorism, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, the numerous rejections of peace offers and independence by the Palestinians. Hamas and Oct. 7 rate not a single mention anywhere in his text. It is not so much an example of bad reporting or history as a parody of a book about a complicated topic.
Actually, it’s an example of vicious Jew-hating propaganda, unashamed and unapologetic. And I believe Coates is such a praised literary lion that his book will influence a great many people who are ignorant of the actual history.
Meanwhile, the interview at CBS – in which one reporter actually challenged Coates on his garbage – has had some very instructive fallout. The reporter has gotten into a heap of trouble at CBS. Some excerpts:
Interviewer Dokoupil [of CBS] had the gall to question Nahesi-Coates about his anti-Israel comments.
“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?”
This, as Puck News’ Dylan Byers reported on X, was when things started to go wrong for Dokoupil. According to Byers:
“CBS NEWS has been roiling after a CBS Mornings interview in which anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed Ta-Nehisi Coates over his pro-Palestinian framing of Israel-Palestine conflict. The interview was celebrated by many—’tense and substantive,’ per WaPo—but angered some at CBS who felt Dokoupil brought his own bias.”
Byers then noted that CBS News honchos Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark, at a Monday morning meeting, “told staff that the interview did not meet editorial standards for impartiality, though they declined to elaborate on how or why. When they tried to move on, CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford criticized the leaders for their decision, saying the following…”
Much much more at the link.
Dokoupil must have thought he was interviewing a Republican. He forgot the cardinal rule that Coates – a much-feted literary lion who is black, leftist, and a mouthpiece for blaming whites and now Jews for whatever is wrong with the world – cannot be challenged like that.
So now we have this sad result. It’s hard to summarize, but the gist of it is that Dokoupil was made to apologize in a big struggle session, and it has also been revealed that CBS vetted its questions with Coates and Dokoupil failed to check everything out with him. This of course is not journalism. But CBS doesn’t do journalism. An excerpt:
But Coates also revealed a detail that caught our eye. As he was praising King [who also interviewed him] as a “great journalist and a great interviewer,” he said that “Gayle came behind the stage before we went [on] and she had gone through the book, and I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I’m gonna ask you about this. I’m gonna ask you about that.’?”
So let’s get this straight: One journalist is raked over the coals for asking tough questions, while another journalist—if Coates’s recollection is correct—previews her questions and faces no repercussions. (King did not respond to a request for comment.)
Which poses a few questions. Chief among them: Are there different rules for different journalists at CBS?
A former CBS journalist told The Free Press that “If she was showing him specific lines of questioning in advance, that would violate journalistic standards. Now are they going to investigate her and say that what she did was not in keeping with CBS standards? I suspect not.”
One last thing: Let’s just say we have pattern recognition around stories like these. So when two sources at CBS told The Free Press that this whole dustup involved the network’s “Race and Culture Unit,” we weren’t shocked.
According to the company’s website, this unit works “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone, and intention.” It was formed in the summer of 2020. “We must always be aware of how race and culture impacts our journalism—and, in terms of the future of CBS News, this unit will be as important as Standards and Practices,” a CBS executive said at the time.
Journalism? I think not. Or rather, it’s what journalism (I prefer the term “reporting”) has morphed into these days.