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Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel
The Compact ^ | 10 October 2024 | Helen Andrews

Posted on 10/11/2024 9:04:20 AM PDT by Rummyfan

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist. Other people interest him only insofar as they reflect his own thoughts and feelings. That is what makes him such a bad reporter, a shortcoming he freely admits to. “Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

(Excerpt) Read more at compactmag.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Politics; Society
KEYWORDS:
The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:

Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.

There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?

1 posted on 10/11/2024 9:04:20 AM PDT by Rummyfan
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To: Rummyfan

Not to mention that Coates is a total fraud, as a writer and an intellectual.


2 posted on 10/11/2024 9:04:54 AM PDT by Rummyfan ( In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.)
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To: Rummyfan
More on Coates:

Why the Left Worships Ta-Nehisi Coates

3 posted on 10/11/2024 9:07:48 AM PDT by Rummyfan ( In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.)
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To: Rummyfan

Don’t waste your time reading an article about a writer who only wastes your time.

These folks are so full of themselves


4 posted on 10/11/2024 9:14:24 AM PDT by SteelPSUGOP (UGHT)
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To: Rummyfan

Hates white people too.


5 posted on 10/11/2024 9:19:17 AM PDT by Luke21
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To: Rummyfan

Jealousy and he’s just a fraud, taking the easy path of race hustlers before him.


6 posted on 10/11/2024 9:41:06 AM PDT by TheThirdRuffian (Orange is the new brown in)
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