Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.” https://t.co/oMU9ZAXoBx

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 23, 2024

The reaction to this will be interesting.

Ha I was about to post the exact same thing

Well.

But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

He talked about this a bit a few months ago in his final appearance on the now-defunct Longform podcast:
https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-584-ta-nehisi-coates

(I don't remember where in the episode it is, but the whole thing's a good listen if you like TNC.)

“It’s not like Arthur Sulzberger is rubbing his hands together” and dictating pro-Israeli coverage, Coates continued, noting that the Times had recently published a mammoth investigation into how Jewish extremists had taken over the Israeli state. It’s that in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

great article, even if ILX is never mentioned in it

Our work itself is the reward.

chait’s gotta be fuming

The woman who yelled at TNC is on twitter.

Wow, it turns out I played a role in pushing Ta-Nehisi Coates to look more deeply into Palestine.

I was the woman who yelled on the mic about Palestine and got shouted down at his event with Jeffrey Goldberg, it was at the Sixth & I synagogue in DC I think in 2014.

That was… pic.twitter.com/RcESBIbzNW

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) September 24, 2024

lol she was yelling at dersh just yesterday

(i have her filed as kind of a grayzone-adjacent nuisance-stroke-menace but nuisance-stroke-menace can sometimes get good results, thats politics baby)

Just seen what Dershowitz is up to and...

i thought it was really cool of him to show up in my parents town, where my mom taught, to support a teacher who was reprimanded for teaching "between the world and me" to a high school AP class. my mom got a chance to talk to him and called me immediately afterward like she was on cloud 9

― Heez, Tuesday, July 18, 2023 12:49 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol my mom appears in his next book. she's the one who's become a big Colson Whitehead fan

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message

saw online zionists hopping angry at him over his appearance on NPR yesterday morning, throwing 'antisemitic' around left and right.

that's amazing xp

xp that’s basically the focus of this interview

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, “The Message,” is a trio of interconnected essays that examine how the stories people tell — or avoid telling — can shape and even distort reality: “I am most concerned always with those that don’t have a voice.” https://t.co/bDsBxZMbah pic.twitter.com/G4WCkI146I

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) September 30, 2024

Damn that interviewer is a fucking joke

great interview

great responses by TNC tbc lol

yeah he handled that really well

i know it sounds silly but his responses were so good it almost makes me wonder if the interviewer wasn't in on it

lol that is not the Occam's razor explanation

Learning a lot more than I bargained for about the guy who treated Ta-Nehisi Coates like a terrorist on CBS this morning https://t.co/ynPDLwTzbx

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) October 1, 2024

Wow that was a real "when did you stop beating your wife" interview.

I think I’d rather cut my pinky off with no anaesthetic than go through an adult circumcision.

So *holding a cup of warm morning coffee* do the Palestinian people have a right to exist?

The insane interrogation of Coates and the regurgitation of Israeli, anti-Palestinian propaganda by host Tony Dokoupil makes sense when you learn that he is fully personally invested in the system of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid. https://t.co/MYDOlMb4jN pic.twitter.com/FosfKHhi9O

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) September 30, 2024

stupid tweet

yes bad tweet

it’s a little histrionic but on the substance seems fine

People were digging up a lot of odd stuff about that interviewer.

I’m not going to say that interviewer is good not bad but that’s not good evidence there

TIL that guy is Katy Tur's husband.

the adult circumcision thing seems a little extreme

TIL that guy is Katy Tur's husband.

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0),

holy shit

I've watched the TNC clip twice and can't believe how well he controlled himself before such idiocy, though I swear I could hear his heart thumping.

His dismissal of the "right to exist" BS was something I've been waiting for someone to do for a long time.

I mean in a mainstream media setting

Totally.

not sure I’d do as well on TV but seems like a pretty classic case of a self-assured person who’s a lot smarter than the person asking them dumb questions

PK otm, despite the unhinged nature of the questions, I think it's seriously valuable to have that answer get attention

did the interviewer really ask if Palestinians had the right to exist

I thought this was good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0-y0X51Xtw

everything about that adult circumcision article is weird, especially the choice of graphic, but he does mention a few paragraphs in that he was medically circumcised at birth.

Yeah, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds. As I understand it, when it comes to conversions, it's mostly symbolic/minimal/non-invasive. As the dude wrote, he (like most men in America) was already circumcised.

Anyway, weird digression.

no it’s pretty fucking weird!

did the interviewer really ask if Palestinians had the right to exist

― symsymsym, Tuesday, 1 October 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Not out cold but near enough. Around 3:30 is where he is wondering out loud on this: If Israel can't exist, then why do Palestinians or any Muslim countries have the right to exist?

Fella has a taste for nuking Muslims.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates says #Israel is an "apartheid state." @MSNBC's @chrislhayes on @allinwithchris agrees with him that situation in Hebron is "moral abomination." #Gaza #Lebanon #WestBank #Iran pic.twitter.com/5x2eZvydtt

— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) October 3, 2024

i always like hearing my old village voice colleague speak. just as long as we don't forget that the u.s. is still a WAY bigger morally reprehensible country with intact systems of apartheid. number one, baby!

I think that's something Coates always acknowledges, and helpfully, but only when prompted/pushed by his interlocutor. Like that TV interview just upthread, Coates derides Israel's system of apartheid, and the other guy's response is basically "but what about ... ?!" And Coates patiently pushes back that that *is* bad, too, but it doesn't make Israel's system any more right or moral. That if memory serves has been his useful, and imo powerful, response to past "what about ..." criticisms: America is just as bad, if not sometimes worse, and has been for centuries. Coates is particularly good at laying out clearly the lingering half-life and echoes and other effects of immoral or bad ideas and explaining that just because something is ostensibly over does not mean it is done.