David Saranga
@DavidSaranga
From
@Telegraph by @KaufmanDavidNYC:
“Any notion that the debate about Israel in the aftermath of the horrors of the Hamas massacre could not get any more morally twisted was dispelled on Monday afternoon when CBS – America’s legendary “Tiffany Network” – admonished one of its leading morning news anchors for daring to do his job.
“The anchor, Tony Dokoupil, was reportedly brow-beaten by his bosses for allegedly showing bias during an interview last week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Dokoupil, who is white and Jewish, challenged some of the claims within Coates’ new book, The Message, part of which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Coates’ proffers two conceits in The Message – the first, that Israel is a segregationist apartheid state, perhaps the most racialised and racist nation to exist today. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his view, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians within its territorial control is akin to the cruelty of America’s Jim Crow South.
“Coates’ second launching point is equally spurious: that he has a right – if not an obligation – to expose Israel’s supposed evils because he is African-American, because he and the Palestinians somehow bear a shared history as “conquered people”.
“The problem, as Dokoupil tried to highlight, is that charges of Israeli “apartheid” are both contested and highly-politicised, demanding a level of historical fluency and intellectual sophistication far beyond Coates’ pay grade. Prior to the ten days he spent in Israel and the West Bank last year, the author had never stepped foot in the Middle East. (He’s apparently never been to South Africa, either – curious, considering all that apartheid talk).
“It was within this charged and chaotic context that Dokoupil did the unthinkable: he asked Coates to actually defend his views. Unthinkable not because the anchor’s questions – while pointed – were particularly out of line. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked in one instance. Harsher, sure, was his assertion that Coates’ book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” owing to its omission of any talk of Palestinian terror or accountability.
“No, the entire Coates-Dokoupil debate boils down to optics, in other words race. Coates is black, Dokoupil is white – and within the racialised hierarchy that has legitimised Coates, any challenge, particularly around race or identity, cannot be tolerated. It’s the same system that prevents serious engagement with, say, Kamala Harris’ background – where she is described as African-American despite the fact that neither of her parents are. If a person of colour speaks about colour (any colour), they must always be right – facts and data points be damned (and I write this as a person of colour).“
3:48 PM · Oct 9, 2024
