#horrorism

Kevin from the game 'Our Love is Electrifying'

“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!”

(…)

The conclusion he comes to is that the Jewish state is the equivalent of the Jim Crow South. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. “‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd.”

If his luck had been different, and he were less self-involved, Coates could have come up with a better checkpoint anecdote than the lame one he offers. Something like the incident in November 2009 when a Palestinian music teacher on his way to teach a lesson was held at the Beit Iba checkpoint and forced to take out his violin and play it while Israeli soldiers laughed. There you have something more than inconvenience, a vivid and poetic illustration of the dehumanization ordinary Palestinians often face. There, too, you have a rebuttal: The 2001 Sbarro pizza shop bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 16 Israelis including a pregnant woman, was committed by a Palestinian who hid his bomb in a guitar case.

These are the kinds of complexities Coates has no time for. Since he first publicly embraced the Palestinian cause, his liberal friends have been telling him that the issue is complex. “Horseshit,” he told the New York magazine interviewer. Palestine is no more complicated than slavery or segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.” When the interviewer asked him about Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Coates compared it to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion: “I would’ve been one of those people that would’ve been like, ‘I’m not cool with this.’ But Nat Turner happens in a context.”

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?

Earlier in the book, Coates talks about his 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” which cemented his status as America’s most prominent public intellectual. “In the months before the article was published, I felt that I had at last discovered the answer to the haunting question of why my people so reliably settled at the bottom of nearly every socioeconomic indicator,” he writes. “The answer was simple: The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder. I was blessed with a gift, and the gift was not simply the knowledge that ‘they’ were lying (about us, about this country, and about themselves), but the proof.”

What he loved most about that article, in other words, was the feeling of finally being able to blame all the problems of black America on other people. Israel took that away from him. All the excuses for why his father’s black paradise remained a fantasy applied equally to the Jews, but they overcame the hostility of the world to succeed where Garvey & Co. failed. That, and not any resemblance to Jim Crow, is the reason Coates hates Israel so bitterly.

(…)

For a while, it looked as though a similar divorce might happen again in our day. Many liberals were genuinely shocked by the support for Palestine on college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. It caused many to rethink their support for “wokeness” and its crude division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, evil whites and blameless people of color. Wealthy liberals like Bill Ackman defected. Suspicions of anti-Semitism among Black Lives Matter activists, which The New York Times had covered as far back as 2018, gained new credence as campus protesters chanted “From the River to the Sea” and some embraced paraglider iconography. The tensions threatened to bring about a split in the left as far-reaching as that of the 1970s.

There is little reason to expect a replay of history, however. The demographics have changed too much. In 1970, the American electorate and Harvard’s undergraduate student body were both close to 90 percent white. Today. the situation is very different. Last year, people of color made up a majority of children under 18 and a majority of every Ivy League freshman class, except at Dartmouth. At the same time, Jewish enrollment at Harvard is lower than it was during the bad old days of quotas in the 1920s. Demographics don’t perfectly predict political opinions, on this issue or any other, but defectors from the left may be surprised to discover that wokeness, the ideology of valorizing all people of color, has quite enough inertia to carry on without their help.

The future we face is encapsulated in an anecdote that occurred when Coates stopped pontificating to himself and listened to other people for a change. Avner, who leads a group of former Israeli Defense Force soldiers who now favor a more liberal policy toward the Palestinians, is showing Coates around the West Bank with their driver Guy. Coates asks these two Israelis what they would do differently if they were in charge. Avner says he favors self-determination for both peoples. “The question is, can there be a way to have the right to self-determination for Israelis and to Palestinians? I think the answer is yes, there has to be. I mean, there’s no other way.”

Guy doesn’t have time for Avner’s waffle. “I see the establishment of Israel as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened,” he says. “It’s something I can’t live with. And I think in order to have some kind of sustainable, reasonable life here, there should be a real change.”

Coates was instrumental in bringing American elites from having Avner’s view to Guy’s, in respect of their own country. Before, America was flawed but redeemable; now, it was sinful from Day One, founded on slavery and plunder. This line sounded good to many American liberals when its implications weren’t entirely clear. It is much easier to see what abolishing the occupier state means in the context of Israel. The idea shocks many Americans. Whether the future belongs to the liberalism of yesterday or the wokeness of tomorrow will depend on their ability to apply the lessons of that shock to their own case.”

“And here is where I largely agree with him: The problem Israel faces isn’t morally complicated at all. It might have been on October 6, 2023. But after October 7, things got simple.

The terrorist organizations Coates whitewashes or ignores openly and proudly insist that they want Israel destroyed. I’m not even referring to those insipid chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” one hears from Western apologists for terrorism. I mean that their leaders and founding documents plainly state that their goal is to eradicate Jews and their country.

Hamas and Hezbollah have never been subtle or ambiguous: They want Israel gone and the Jews living there dead or exiled. The Houthis’ official slogan is “God Is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” Coates could find this out by spending five minutes on Wikipedia.

When someone clearly expresses an intent to murder you and your family, a lot of complexity melts away.

And when they back up their words with actions, things get simpler still. A year ago, Hamas launched a brutal attack in which they murdered men, women, and children; raped women; and kidnapped hundreds. This wasn’t the rhetorical cosplay we’ve seen on American college campuses. This was a deliberate and wanton slaughter of civilians. And in the wake of the attacks, Hamas’ leaders vowed to repeat them again and again.

Except for the issue of retrieving their hostages and adhering to the laws of war rejected entirely by Hamas, Israel’s options were decidedly uncomplicated. And that’s why Coates’ cartoonish understanding of Israel and the Palestinians is so pernicious.

(…)

If you tell the Israelis that compromise is pointless because their country should not exist or be able to defend itself, they will simply ignore you, and rightly so. And if you tell Americans they must choose between terrorist organizations that proudly rape and murder civilians and a democratic ally that doesn’t promise death to America, the odds are good that they’re going to pick the latter.

If Palestinians had eschewed violence in favor of peaceful resistance and moral suasion, they probably would have had a viable state long ago. But Palestinian leaders and Arab governments rejected that approach for decades. Indeed, the Oct. 7 attack was intended to prevent such an approach. The normalization of relations between Israel and Arab governments was a major motivation for it.

Coates and his defenders insist that they want “moral clarity” on the conflict. I believe moral clarity is on Israel’s side. It’s a democracy whose Muslim and Arab citizens have rights that they wouldn’t enjoy in most Arab and Muslim countries. Israel tries to protect civilians and is called genocidal. Hamas calls for genocide, and they are called victims.

I could go on, but even if you reject such facts as irrelevant, Hamas has forced Israelis to either defend themselves or die. Such a choice makes everything clear and simple very quickly. Israel’s flaws vanish before that existential test. That’s why complexity is the only hope the Palestinians have.

“Supporting Ukraine and Israel is morally right and advances America’s strategic interests. Siding with Russia against Ukraine or with Hamas against Israel, by design or negligence, is un-American. Ukraine and Israel are faced with life-or-death threats to their populations and to their democracies. But their struggles are also a test for our democracy, which has served as a beacon of hope and stalwart supporter of these kinds of fights for freedom and democracy throughout the world for generations.

(…)

Hamas and Russia are first and foremost enemies of Israel and Ukraine, but not exclusively. They will continue to unleash terror around the world until they are stopped. It is essential that the U.S. provide Israel and Ukraine everything they need to fight and win: anti-missile defenses, ammunition, access to intelligence, humanitarian assistance, training and more. The aid both countries are requesting, combined, is a minuscule percentage of the U.S. budget — defense or domestic. But that aid could mean the difference between victory and defeat for Israel and Ukraine and for the future of democracy across the globe. Israel and Ukraine are not asking one single American soldier to risk their life. All they want is for us to give them the tools so that they can do the job.

This is an inflection point for democracy and freedom. We have seen with our own eyes, in real time, the barbarism of both Hamas and Russia. The torture and slaughter of civilians — women, children and elderly, unarmed and begging — and the capture of hostages to serve as human shields are acts not of war but of terror. We cannot stand idly by, bearing witness without providing help. That’s not the American way.

For their sake, for our sake, for the world’s sake, we must fully support Israel and Ukraine in their struggle, in our collective struggle, against the darkest forces of human nature.”

“Asked about antisemitism in Ukraine today, Korniychuk links his index finger to his thumb to indicate zero.

After all, other than Israel, Ukraine is the only country in the world that simultaneously had a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister. Volodymyr Groysman served as prime minister from 2016 to August 2019. For the latter part of that period, Volodymyr Zelensky was already president, having come into office in May 2019, and it was common knowledge that both Volodymyrs were of Jewish parentage

(…)

How many Ukrainians live in Israel? As registration is not compulsory, Korniychuk cannot give an exact figure. Although 15,000 are registered, he estimates that there are approximately half a million Russian-speaking Ukrainians who have made their homes in Israel, plus a large number of Israelis who are entitled to Ukrainian passports.

Of the Ukrainians in Israel, 2,500 including dual nationals, left during the first two weeks of the war. During the first two weeks of the war in Ukraine, some 1,400 people lost their lives, says Korniychuk, underscoring that this is approximately equal to the number of people killed by Hamas during the massacre.

Korniychuk notes that Israel was essentially founded by Ukrainian Jews, who though they came to reestablish a Jewish homeland, nonetheless carried Ukraine in their hearts.

(…)

Inasmuch as the hostage situation and the war in Gaza continue to occupy the attention of the international media, Korniychuk sees this waning soon in the same way that interest in the war in Ukraine has waned.

First paragraph of Call of Cthulhu, as relevant as ever.