Given her post-October 6 reporting, it’s no surprise that PBS/CNN host Christian Amanpour manages little sympathy for Israel’s two-front fight against Islamic terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, but her introduction to Friday’s Amanpour & Co. (PBS) interview of left-wing darling Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing his ignorant anti-Israel book was still a bit much.
Host Christiane Amanpour: ….our next guest says that he must confront the truth no matter how difficult. The award-winning journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is doing exactly that in his new book, The Message, in which he journeys to Senegal, Israel, and the occupied West Bank. And he's joining Michel Martin to discuss what he found.
Michel Martin, Contributor: In story, I guess, as you were -- as you would say, in story, they were embodied in story and that story kind of infiltrated you in ways that you perhaps were not really aware of. So, then, May of 2023, you visited Israel and the Palestinian territories. So, in the book, you draw parallels between Jim Crow America and the Israeli occupation of these territories. You called it separate and unequal, alive and well. You say it's a place where the glare of racism burned more intensely than anywhere else in your life that you had ever seen. So, tell us a little bit about why you say that.
Coates parachuted into Israel, absent any historical context, and had the nerve to question why Israel would insist on security measures against Palestinians. Could it be the thousands of Jews killed by Palestinian terrorists over the decades?
Coates’s whitewash of Palestinians was pitched in elevated language, rounded off with a simplistic smear.
Coates: And this, you know, control of time and space extended out into the West Bank, where, you know, there are roads for Palestinians and then there are roads for Israeli settlers, which immediately set off my -- you got two different roads for two different classes of people. So, that immediately sets off alarm bells for me. You know, you're seeing in the territory and you can see one place where settlements are and where settlers live and they're marked in a certain way. And then, you can see other areas where they're Palestinian villages and Hamlet's and where they live. And you can see that these are completely separate.….the closest that I would see in my time to the Jim Crow that my parents were born into.
Interviewer Martin repeated his offensive and ignorant opinion, common among anti-Semites, that Israel, far more diverse than its hostile Arab neighbors, is somehow “an apartheid regime.”
Martin: So, your core conclusions are, it's an apartheid regime, the life there for Palestinians is unbearable, it's unbearable, it's demeaning, it's dehumanizing, and it's morally unjustifiable.
Coates: ….I know this word apartheid, is harsh….
Coates got his dubious information from “Human Rights Watch and their reports,” which isn’t exactly renowned for its objective view on Israel, and has previously attracted journalistic condemnation for fundraising in Saudi Arabia against Israel.
Martin eventually offered some convoluted criticism, delivered in a “some critics say” mode to soften the blow.
Martin: ….Some of the criticism is you went for 10 days….This is a nation state that has existed in its current form for 75 years at this point. These are people who have indigenous claims to this land for centuries. Not just the Palestinians have indigenous claims to this land, but also the Hebrew people, the Jewish people have indigenous claims to this land, and these borders have moved back and forth for centuries….
She did challenge Coates’ “unwillingness to include, for purposes of this report, other views because, you know, we are constantly being instructed, especially in this very polarized time that that's fundamental to empathy. And if we don't at least engage in that practice, that we're not being true to that fundamental value of trying to see other people as human.”
Coates: The first thing I would say is the pro-Israel point of view, the Zionist point of view, those who view the Zionist project as a good thing, as a moral thing, as a just thing, they are not unrepresented in the vehicles of American media in our newspapers, in our magazines, in our television shows. That viewpoint is not unrepresented. On the contrary, it's one that I was very much exposed to. And what the purpose of that last essay really is, is I am someone who went somewhere and saw something and came back struggling with how it could be that what I saw was so different than what -- than the story that I was consuming in my media on a regular basis. And I really wanted to understand why….
MRC's Rich Noyes proved plenty of journalists were ready to “defend the indefensible” since last October 7. And surely Coates is not saying that U.S. Jews have too many bylines?
The Washington Examiner nailed Coates’ dishonest deletion of inconvenient Palestinian history.
The Palestinians of The Message are uncannily peaceful, yearning to write poetry and plow the “sacred land” beneath their feet. Nowhere in his book, not once, does Coates bother mentioning “Hamas” despite writing it right after one of the largest massacres of Jews in history. Nowhere in his polemic about the Palestinian struggle does Coates type the words “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or “PLO” or “Fatah,” much less “Hezbollah” or “Iran.”
