Far-left author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who regrettably wrote atrocious runs on Black Panther and Captain America comics over the past decade, was recently interviewed on CBS Mornings, where his hostility to the land of Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s ancestors came to the fore as he promoted a new, offensive book he’s written. As first told by Newsbusters:
CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil displayed a lot of courage on Monday’s show when confronted race hustler and author Ta-Nehisi Coates for his new book The Message, where Coates took the side of anti-Semitic, genocidal terrorists in their fight to exterminate Israel. Dokoupil pointed out that Coates completely omitted Israel’s perspective in the conflict and suggested Coates essay read like the manifesto “in the backpack of an extremist.”
Coates responded by claiming he was morally superior because he’s black.
And is the disgraced Bill Cosby superior for the same reason? What a sorry, unendurable case Coates is, and shameful he would do this. There’s more:
The CBS anchor actually got Coates to admit that he believed that Israel did not have a right to exist, and essentially Israel needs to fight for it:
DOKOUPIL: So, I think the question is central and key. If Israel has a right to exist, and if your answer is “no,” then I guess the question becomes, why do the Palestinians have a right to exist? Why do 20 different Muslim countries have a right to exist?
COATES: My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force, as America did. And so I think this question of right to Israel does exist. It`s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.
Coates doesn’t seem to realize that his suggestion that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because they need to fight to earn it, means that a Palestinian states doesn’t deserve to exist because they lose every fight for it.
Dokoupil hit back hard and pressed his guest to answer: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?” But Coates gave a mealy mouth answer about being against any ethno state, despite the fact that that was what the Palestinians wanted.
Further, Dokoupil called out how Coates’s book gave “no agency” to the Palestinians as if things just happened to them and they did nothing at all. “They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture, as though they don`t have a stake in this as well. What is their role in the lack of a Palestinian state?” he asked.
Backed into a corner, Coates relied on his race-baiting. He suggested that Dokoupil didn’t get it because he’s white and that he, himself was morally superior because he’s black: “I have a very, very, very, very moral compass about this. And again, perhaps it`s because of my ancestry.”
It’s a shame that later on, CBS management attacked Dokoupil for asking serious queries, and forced him to apologize. He shouldn’t have done that, and if needed, he should’ve quit his job with them. Even long before this flap, CBS was repulsive, and still is.
It gets worse. As reported by Breitbart, this man, who again, was allowed to script Captain America and Black Panther in past years, also said:
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates openly wondered aloud if he would be “strong enough” to resist the kind of violence exhibited by the terrorist organization Hamas in Israel on October 7 were he to grow up as a Palestinian living in Gaza.
Coates, who recently released a book that accused Israel of practicing a form of apartheid, made his thoughts known during an interview on the What Now with Trevor Noah podcast. Coates wondered if perhaps growing up “under that oppression” would make him so radicalized that he would then commit the kind of violence Hamas exhibited on October 7, wherein over 1,200 men, women, and children were indiscriminately and brutally killed with full malicious intent.
“And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, ‘This is too far.’ I don’t know that I am,” he said, a sentiment that Trevor Noah and his co-host appeared to empathize with.
During another part of the interview, Trevor Noah even said that America’s founding fathers were like terrorists when they revolted against the British Empire.
“If you remove America’s history … then it’s like, yeah, those people who fought against the British, they were terrorists,” Noah said.
So even the anti-American sentiment of both came to the fore. Do they not realize that any community that’s going to emphasize barbarism cannot be given employment or any direct freedom if they’re going to resort to murder and sexual violence? It’s chilling to wonder: if the Jewish founders of early comicdom were at that music festival, and they were graphically raped and murdered, what would Coates say, considering he wrote Captain America and Black Panther, and was even once offered the opportunity to script a Superman film? I shudder to think what his response would be.
Daniel Greenfield had more to say about him:
Even the firefighters and police officers who perished on 9/11 at the hands of the Islamic terrorists whom Coates now covers up for “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a privileged millionaire, took a break from writing bad comic books and took his incredibly fragile body to Israel where he discovered the racism of black Israeli soldiers.
“There were ‘Black’ soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’,” Coates fumed, discovering that “race is a species of power and nothing else”. Despite damning the black Israeli soldiers, Coates can’t help reflexively capitalizing them as ‘Black’ and decapitalizing Muslim terrorists as ‘white’. Some habits of black nationalist woke language are harder to shake than imagining race as power.
But in this moment, Coates officially makes the sacrifice of trading blackness for wokeness, race as a living reality for race as a subset of Marxist power analysis. It’s every bit as potent as feminists who have spent generations denouncing men suddenly deciding that men can be women as long as they give up their toxic masculinity, put on a pantsuit and identify as ‘women’.
What of the ‘black body’ of Joshua Loitu Mollel, a Tanzanian agricultural intern who was kidnapped and killed by Hamas, who only wanted to return home and become one of Tanzania’s most successful farmers? What of Clemence Mtenga, also of Tanzania, another potential hostage, who turned out to be dead? Where did the power lie? Were they white or black?
One of the biggest problems with men like Coates is that, as Greenfield points out, he doesn’t care about blacks living in foreign countries, and Coates’ descriptions of black citizens of Israel is obscene and abominable. So, what exactly is it creeps like Coates are campaigning for? He turns his back on serious issues that’ve sadly been prevalent for years, and that’s why his positions are entirely unconvincing. And yes, the comics Coates wrote were bad, and Axel Alonso was wrong to have given him any assignments to write books starring Jewish-created characters like BP and CA.
Towards the end of the article:
That Jewish lives have no value to a man who viewed even 9/11 firefighters as “not human” is unsurprising. In his essay, Coates reveals that black people also have no value to him.
And that’s telling quite a bit about a man who never deserved to write the comics he did in the past decade. One of the worst things about Coates is that, if he visited Israel recently, he did so with a predetermined position, and a closed mind on the issues involved. That’s not how you solve a problem.
On the other hand, I don’t think JNS editor Jonathan Tobin did an entirely good job addressing the subject:
The first thing to understand is that Ta-Nehisi Coates is something of a colossus of contemporary American letters. Since his first article was published in 2008 in the liberal publication The Atlantic, the 49-year-old has been showered with acclaim and every conceivable honor from the cultural establishment, including an obligatory MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award. Everything he writes—from comic books to memoirs about his own brief existence on the planet—is treated as a major literary event.
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.
That philosophy is perfectly fine for comic books, such as Coates’ best-selling Black Panther series, which imagines a fictional high-tech African kingdom that was made into a blockbuster action movie. However, when it comes to his interpretations of American society and foreign conflicts, he seems to view the real world with all of its complexities as just another graphic fantasy populated only by heroes and villains.
While there’s a fully valid point made that Coates’ acclaim coming from establishment circles was clearly deliberate (and that’s surely how Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro got as far as they did in some literary circles), why does Tobin think Coates is “talented”, when here, he’s legitimizing barbarism even against blacks, and why does Tobin think philosophies like CRT and intersectionality are okay in comics format? Most certainly not. A comic is no different from movies and TV shows in how it can be exploited as a propaganda pipeline, and under Marvel/DC editors like Joe Quesada, Alonso and Dan DiDio, this was definitely proven in some way or other over the past 2 decades.
Related J.J. Abrams & Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Superman Still in Development
Past comics editors, publishers and even film studios who employed Coates have caused monumental damage that’ll take an eternity to repair, right down to how they allowed him to script comics with Jewish creators. Coates has effectively tainted and desecrated the creations of Lee, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in example, and this is decidedly one more reason why, when Marvel/DC close their publishing arms, it’ll be for the best, if that’s what it takes to prevent further abuse by political ideologues with twisted viewpoints.
Update: National Review says about Coates:
Peace overtures throughout the 1990s were met with routine suicide-bomb attacks inside Israel. The unilateral disengagement of every Israeli from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was similarly met with the democratic election of an Islamist mafia we now know as Hamas. The current multifront war, of course, began with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.
Coates argued that Palestinian violence doesn’t justify Israel’s administration of the West Bank. But shaking your finger at the Jewish state for simply trying to preserve its existence is less than convincing, especially when you don’t want to explore why the Israelis fight back in the first place.
Correct. Here’s more from Compact Mag:
It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. […]
There’s only so many leftists like him who are. J. Jonah Jameson would make a perfect avatar to represent them.
Originally published here.
English (US) · 