How to take down black antisemites like Ta-Nehisi Coates
A self-proclaimed advocate for blacks everywhere, the writer ignores the ongoing brutal Islamic “holy war” in at least nine African countries.
By Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser
JNS
Dec 4, 2024
CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil (R) interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book “The Message” on September 30, 2024
Ta-Nehisi Coates masquerades as a champion of black people, but the reality is that he is enabling the work of their enemies.
As a self-proclaimed advocate for African-Americans, Coates ignores the ongoing brutal Islamic “holy war” in at least nine African countries—Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan—where Arabs and African Muslims are regularly murdering, raping and taking non-Muslim or un-Arabized Africans as slaves.
Coates cannot mention these atrocities because it would undermine his central argument—that only white oppressors are victimizing brown and black people everywhere. His decision to disregard these theaters of jihad is a deceit, an evasion that erases the moral superiority that has earned him such public acclaim and deference.
In his new book, The Message, Coates maps his simple formula onto Israeli Jews whom he casts as “white” oppressors abusing non-white Palestinians. When CBS News censured its own (Jewish) news anchor, Tony Dokoupil, for pushing back against Coates during a discussion of his book, the ensuing controversy focused on whether the network should subject writers “of color” to journalistic challenges.
There is a more urgent matter: Dokoupil’s defense of Israel didn’t work. While Dokoupil pointed out how Coates evaded the complexities of the conflict and omitted facts that supported Israel’s position, the average audience member was more likely swayed by his simple portrait of Israel as a racist society than by Dokoupil’s efforts to insert context.
Responding to defamatory claims against Israel with myth-busters about the conflict remains the semi-official Jewish method of response to anti-Israel slander. It has always failed as new lies just keep coming—first, the Jews stole the land, they defeated Arab armies only because America helped them, then they stole water, and now they commit genocide. Opposing misinformation alone has failed spectacularly, just look at what’s happening on college campuses and in city streets. Yet even today, the pro-Israel pamphlets distributed to Jewish students on campus follow the prescription: “Countering the Lies.”
This strategy fails because it is exclusively defensive. While refuting lies is a necessity, it is only a first step. As in war, the best defense is a strong offense. The Arab world has more to answer for regarding every charge thrown at Israel: conquest, imperialism, subjugation of minorities and the flagrant abuse of basic human rights. The myth-busting strategy never calls out the liars and never turns the charges back against them. Instead, it locks Israel’s defenders in the dock as the accused and has them spending time trying to refute one libel after another. Dokoupil’s interventions, while good and well-delivered, cannot prevail against a torrent of lies.
Judaism teaches that a primary goal of life is to achieve the highest moral conduct possible. Hyper-scrutiny of Jewish conduct is normal Jewish practice. Jewish consciousness questions Jewish conduct continually. So when Jewish behavior is singled out for criticism by their foes—not to improve but to harm them—old Jewish habits have them starting on the defense. “Are we doing what they say?” comes naturally, but “Who are you to accuse?” does not. Yet the key to winning rhetorical battles is to turn the fire back on your accuser.
Leftist and human-rights groups are seen as moral actors due to their reputation as fighters for the oppressed, the marginalized and the abused. It is this reputation of virtue that protects them from the charge of antisemitism when they focus on Israel and the plight of the Palestinians. Even blatant hostility to Israel is assumed to be a natural extension of their good works.
But they have an insoluble problem: The values of the rights community and the progressive left—the rights of women, the LGBTQ community, freedom of speech and religion—are anathema to the Muslim world. By hyper-focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are effectively abandoning the people they are pledged to support and would be expected to champion—those minorities who must pay the price of living under draconian Islamic rule.
As the left has abandoned their original clients to focus on Israel, their claim of acting for social justice can be exposed as fraud. How dare they abandon the gays, the women, the besieged African Christians in the Muslim world. Who are they if they do this?
When Jews respond to attacks on Israel by citing Muslim oppression of these minorities, Israel’s detractors accuse them of engaging in “what-aboutism” by trying to distract from the issue at hand: Jewish conduct. But why should this be the issue at hand? Had the rights community been honest from the start, Muslim oppression of minorities would have been a major target decades ago. The answer to “what-aboutism” is clear: “Are you abandoning black jihad slaves so that you can hit at the Jews or are you campaigning against the Jews to hide Islamist savagery?”
For black antisemites to abandon their African sisters and brothers is egregious. They are turning their backs on their own. Black Jew-haters like Coates, Louis Farrakhan and Marc Lamont Hill—even conservative ones like Candance Owens— ignore the tragedy of blacks murdered and enslaved by Muslims in Africa so they can identify with Arab Muslims against the Jewish state.
Coates claims that it is natural and right to side with the Palestinians because they, like blacks in America, are oppressed by “whites.” To say this, Coates must forget that more than half of Israel’s population are darker-skinned Jews, who are native to the Middle East. Worse, he must deny Muslim mass murder and enslavement of African blacks.
He must obscure the truth that these black victims of jihad are subjected to continuous, brutal violence mirrored in Hamas’s rape and slaughter of Jews. Like the Israelis, burned, hacked and shot to death a year ago, the Africans that Coates ignore suffer the same fate, dragged from their homes and taken hostage. In Algeria, Libya and Mauritania, blacks are trafficked as both grunt and sex slaves, and in the case of Mauritania, owned, like Coates’s own ancestors, as true chattel.
How should defenders of Israel respond to the Coateses of this world?
Here is an opening suggestion: “Mr. Coates you cannot be ignorant of the jihad surging across Africa. Nearly a third of a million black slaves are in Muslim hands today. You cannot be blind to the parallel atrocities committed by jihadists in Nigeria and the jihadist rapes, murders, and abductions of young Jewish women on Oct. 7. Muslim jihadists have been massacring blacks for 1,400 years—including the descendants of the ancient Nubians, from whose language your own name is borrowed. Where is your outrage? Who better than you should lead an effort to emancipate them from servitude and stop the murders?”
The same approach can be applied to a variety of our foes on the left.
To women’s rights groups: “Women in Israel have full rights, but in the Muslim world, they are oppressed. How can you keep silent about crimes against women in Muslim societies while you attack the one country in the Middle East where women are liberated?”
To LGBQT groups: “LGBTQ individuals live freely in Israel. In the Muslim world, they are persecuted, tortured and executed. Why are you silent about their plight in Muslim countries? They will never forgive you.”
To Democrats: “All Muslim countries are ruled by dictators and autocrats whose rule is enforced by brute power. In what democratic universe do activists remain silent about regimes that jail journalists, murder opponents and have no genuine elections?”
For Black Lives Matter and other black groups: “You see Muslims in America as ‘intersectional’ allies because they are, like you, minorities here. But why extend your alliance to their brethren in Africa who are not minorities but the oppressors of minorities and who murder and enslave blacks in Africa? Have you asked Muslims here for their help in liberating Muslim-held slaves in Africa? Where are your public protests against Boko Haram in Nigeria and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan?
Jewish concern cannot be solely to advance Jewish interests. Africans need American Jews to advocate for them, to scream about their plight, and to organize against their slaughter and enslavement. Some of us have begun to do this very Jewish work.
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