Days after CBS executives admonished Tony Dokoupil for his line of questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which the CBS host said that the latter’s new anti-Israel book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” video footage circulated of Coates discussing Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack with former Daily Show host Trevor Noah.
“Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman, and he goes too far out into the sea he might get shot by someone off the side of Israeli boats,” he said. “If my mother picks the olive trees. If she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer, and she needs treatment, because there are no facilities that do that in Gaza, and I don’t get the right permit, she might die.”
“And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down,” he added. “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.”
“The process is complete,” wrote Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. “Demonization: Israel as all that is evil. Delegitimization: Israel as having no right to exist. Double standards: burning alive, mutilation, rape, massacre as legitimate when perpetrated against Israel.”
“Good demonstration of what’s inside and what’s outside the norms of the discourse,” wrote Seth Mandel, senior editor at Commentary magazine. “Guy who says he can imagine going pogroming is celebrated. Guy who says, gee, you sound like an extremist is raked over the coals.”
“The problem with ‘words are violence’ is that violence is therefore words—and just another form of expression,” wrote James Panero, executive editor of the New Criterion.
“Tony Dokoupil was admonished by his own network for saying that if you take away the prestige and the awards, Coates’s book could be found in the backpack of an extremist,” wrote Stephen Miller, a prominent conservative writer. “Here is Coates proving that exact point.”
“The law of wokeness dictates that if you see yourself as less powerful than your perceived foe—white America or Israel—you have no agency and thus no moral responsibility, including not to commit atrocities,” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek opinion editor. “Hence Coates thinks he may have participated in Oct. 7.”
