Posted on 10/13/2024 6:48:11 AM PDT by Words Matter
I cannot believe this needs to be said in 2024, but there is no context in which killing innocent Jews becomes understandable. Everywhere one looks these days, people are ‘contextualising’ pogroms. Among the cranky online right there is a creepy new trend of excuse-making for the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews. And among the woke left, there’s a rush to provide context for Hamas’s butchery of 7 October. Gaza is hellish, they say. Its people are oppressed, they insist. As if any of that explains the rape of Jewish women or the hurling of hand grenades into Jewish children’s faces. No political grievance, not one, makes sense of Jew murder.
The most striking thing about Coates’s latest artless intervention into the discussion of Israel-Gaza is how he puts himself slap bang in the middle of it. Many of today’s moral relativists who masquerade as progressive thinkers have said, or at least implied, that 7 October was a prison-break by the persecuted, a revolt of the downtrodden. But Coates goes a step further. He wonders what he would do. He puts himself in the shoes of the pogromists. I’m all for empathy. But trying to get into the hearts and minds of the men who raped Jewish women and then shot them? Yeah, that’s where my empathy dries up.
Coates’s thought experiment speaks not only to the moral disarray of contemporary ‘progressive’ thought, but to its narcissism, too. As with his new book, The Message, which includes a long section on a trip he took to Israel and Palestine, Coates seems hell-bent on centring his own emotions and hang-ups. The entire wartorn Middle East is reduced to a therapist’s couch for a moneyed American trying to make sense of his own life experiences. His interest in the region seems little more than an extension of his own ceaseless self-reflection as the literary establishment’s anointed truth-teller on race.
So in The Message he likens Israel to ‘the Jim Crow South’ – a spectacularly historically illiterate claim that could only make sense to a man for whom America is the centre of the universe and whose own story is the only story that counts. He writes about ‘the glare of racism’ he felt in Israel. He describes one incident where he and his party were made to wait 45 minutes at a checkpoint outside Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. That’s it? How quickly his empathy evaporates when it comes to Israelis. How striking that the man who understands why a 20-year-old Gazan might join a fascistic pogrom seems incapable of understanding why a Jewish nation surrounded by hostile armies of anti-Semites might politely ask you to wait 45 poxy minutes before accessing a religious site.
Coates’s bending of the sorrows of the Middle East to his own petty agenda of grievance-mongering sums up what ‘Palestine’ has become for the 21st-century progressive. It has become a tool of vicarious victimhood, a means for the rich of the West to metaphorically mingle with the wretched of Gaza in the hope that some of their glow of suffering might rub off and add a little depth to these people’s identitarian complaining. When Coates says he felt the ‘glare of racism’ in Israel, and wonders what he would do if he were a downtrodden Gazan, he exposes the coveting of suffering that motors so-called Palestine solidarity. There’s an ironically neo-colonial vibe here, where a foreign nation is mined not for its resources or territory, but for that other most prized asset in the era of woke: the feeling of victimhood.
As to his confession that, in another life, he might not have been ‘strong enough’ to resist joining the rampage of 7 October – you couldn’t ask for better proof that pity for Palestine is a gateway drug to unhinged hatred for the Jewish nation. And that the modern politics of grievance teeters always on the brink of a politics of vengeance. Listen, if the end result of your ideology is wondering out loud about the circumstances under which you’d possibly join a pogrom, you need a new ideology.
I think he should change the spelling of his name to Ta’Nehisi. That looks more exotic.
The left is prepping to commit genocide, and not just Jews either. But first they want folks used to the idea.
+1
Harris’ 2024 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech drew one of her most thunderous applause lines when she called for an end to the violence and suffering Israel is inflicting in Gaza and for the long-denied fulfillment of Palestinian rights to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination. This enthusiastic reception by tens of thousands of die-hard Democrats at the convention, was a faithful reflection of where the base of the party stands on Israeli issues.
And now we hear that drjill Biden has been pressuring her husband on Israel’s war on Hamas, saying. “Stop it. Stop it now, Joe.” At a Ramadan event at the White House, Joe Biden reportedly told attendees about “Jill’s sophisticated geopolitical advice.”
Progressive agitator Michael Moore told Democrat Biden to stop “funding Israeli genocide.” Moore lacerated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “How many times can Netanyahu flaunt your rules, ignore your advice, and spit in your face? He came to Our House, the People’s House, and spewed hate and violence.”
Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Biden’s approval of sending more weapons to Israel. “The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene,” Sanders said on X, sharing the report of Washington Post. “We must end our complicity: No more bombs to Israel,” Sanders reiterated.
I was listening to a talk show the other day and it was saying that this moron is “intelligent” during an interivew.
He made SEVERAL errors such as using the word “occupied” instead of “preoccupied.”
If this is intelligence, I weep for the future.
Ayn Rand predicted him, too - Lancelot Clokey in “The Fountainhead.”
To expand on Bastiat: “All of socialism is sham and affectation…and stock characters.”
Fine. Let him go to the Middle East and join “The Resistance”. He can put his money where his big mouth is.
We all know why he won’t though....
hussein is the one that promoted this guy.
People such as that fellow makes me glad I was in Jews against Jackson in the 1980s. There is a lot of antisemitism in the Negro community.
That's believable.
I've been looking for that quote for years. Not that it matters, but I can't find too much support for it's being said or written by Frédéric Bastiat. Whether or not he said it, thanks for posting it.
I did find this remarkable expansion of it, on X, by someone identifying himself as Armond White:
"Bastiat said everything about socialism is sham and affectation. I'll go further: everything about the Left is a grotesque costume party of stolen valor festooned in the nomenclature of oppressed people worn as self-congratulation 4 celebrity & wealth. Despicable."
If that wasn't said by someone famous, it was said by someone who should be famous.
Being that his people had no wheel, written language or any invention worthy of mention, he should thank every Jew and white person for providing essentially everything he has.
LOL. True.
Said literature consisting of Kill the Jews in many different forms.
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