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Ta-Nehisi Coates Freed Himself From Zionist Propaganda—Will the Country Follow?
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
Oct 20, 2024
The United States is the single most powerful supporter of the Israeli settler colony.
The U.S. government heavily arms and gives political cover to Israel, and considers the people at the mercy of its aggression as America's enemies. And president after president, Republican and Democrat, has enabled Israel to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide with total impunity.
The current genocide Israel is committing in Palestine is legally and morally placed at the doorstep of the U.S.
Therefore, what happens in the U.S.—especially when the political mainstream begins to wake up and see Zionism for the apocalyptic genocidal fanaticism that it is—matters for world peace.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Zionists—whether Israeli or American, Christian or Jewish—do not like the prospects of that awakening.
As the racist and colonial nature of Israel's regime became more widely recognized, the experiences between Palestinians and the African American community also became more prominently linked, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the last year, several outlets—from The New York Times to Politico, Vox, and others—published articles examining the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity.
Indeed, these discussions emerged in full force after 7 October 2023 as several leading African American public figures and intellectuals made clear their stance on Israel—even making headlines on "how Gaza has shaken Black politics."
When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand and vetoes one Security Council resolution after another to stop the Israeli murderous machinery; when we see U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III in the news pledging his mighty military will protect Israel against attempts to stop its rampage; when the irredeemably corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivers nauseating "stand with Israel" speeches, something deep in the history of African American experience cries foul.
And when Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri avows: "Aipac [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], I'm coming to tear your kingdom down!" she invokes an entirely different legacy of solidarity with Palestinians in African American history, as Israel systematically unleashes its savageries against Palestinians and other Arab nations like Lebanon.
Towering figures like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West have been bold, precise, and hard-hitting when it comes to condemningthe criminal atrocities of the U.S. and Israel in cahoots together.
Reenter Ta-Nehisi Coates
It was not too long ago when the heat on Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent African-American literary and critical voice, got so bad he ran out of the kitchen.
Back in 2017, he deleted his Twitter account with millions of followers and went into occultation following a scathing critique levelled against him by the unflinching moral conscience of Cornel West, a distinguished scholar and activist who called him "the neoliberal face of the Black freedom struggle."
Coates soon left his main outlet, The Atlantic, a major Zionist operation run by former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, that was grooming him as a feather in their Israeli hat. For years, he would oblige.
Coates published his 2008 hymn for Israel, " The Negro Sings of Zionism," which he followed with "The Case for Reparations" in 2014. The essay, which sparked criticism among Palestine advocates, made him a darling of American Zionists.
Coates presented Israel as the model for reparations and thought African Americans ought to do the same as the Israeli state did with Germans.
For a decade now, that bit of Zionist newspeak he embraced under the condition he now calls " default Zionism" has haunted his conscience. Rightly so: Today, when he appears for public interviews, he repeatedly says: "I am ashamed!"
He should be.
Had he not heard of Edward Said when he was entrapped in that "default Zionism"? Any answer he might give to that simple question would be even more incriminating.
The most damning assessment of Coates, however, was not by West, who said in 2017 that Coates "reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people."
In his characteristically patient and precise prose, the eminent Indian public intellectual Pankaj Mishra published a major review of Coates' 2017 book on the Obama era, We Were Eight Years in Power, in the London Review of Books.
Mishra detailed and dissected Coates' deeply white-identified career, which banked on his Black identity to drive guilt-ridden white America to celebrate him—just as Barack and Michelle Obama had done. This was a fact that West had also intuited and laid bare to him.
Mishra picked up on Coates' own sense of wonder in himself, "Why do white people like what I write?" and analysed with surgical precision:
[Coates] also visibly struggles with the question, "Why do white people like what I write?'' This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonized countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by "legacy" periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people—or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in The New York Times's praise for Salman Rushdie: "A continent finding its voice"). Relations between the anointed "representative" writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.
This was published in February 2018, just a few months after West had, with the stroke of a few bold and brilliant paragraphs, forced Coates into early withdrawal from the public to lick his wounds.
It did him good and well.
His new book, The Message, is his deliverance from error, as it were, his version of al-Ghazali's classic al-Munkidh min al-Dalal/Deliverance from Darkness, published nearly 1,000 years ago.
Imagine that! A young African American writer publishes a book that reminds me, a Muslim, of the autobiographical masterpiece of a towering Muslim philosopher mystic. This should mean more to him than any Pulitzer or Booker.
But Coates' visit to Palestine for just 10 days is reminiscent of another even closer Muslim to his home and habitat when Malcolm X visited Gaza in September 1964.
On this occasion, he wrote: "The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders, and also divide the Africans against the Asians."
Bearing witness to Palestinian suffering and Zionist thuggeries, Coates has a giant pair of shoes to fill if he continues on this path.
The long essay Coates wrote on his visit to Palestine, which is included in his book, marks his deliverance from Zionist prose.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Deliverance from Zionism
Immediately after the publication of Coates' latest book, the pro-Israel hasbara machinery, of course, went berserk and unleashed its furies, the racist nature of which managed to surprise even Coates himself.
Other liberal Zionists like Ezra Klein of The New York Times tried to undermine his arguments by asking him why he did not consult with rabid Zionists in Israel when he was there, and of course, setting the usual propaganda trap, "What about Hamas?"
As defined and determined by well-endowed and ideologically committed outlets like the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, the U.S. media is a well-oiled propaganda machinery of hasbara-informed pro-Israel newspeak.
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
Previously, when others like Coates suddenly found a conscience, the mainstream press just turned a deaf ear and pretended it did not happen. Perhaps one recent example is New York Congressman
Jamaal Bowman, whose changed position on Israel not only cost him his reelection campaign but has largely relegated him to obscurity.
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment and their understanding of race and diversity in this country, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
More than half a century after the Civil Rights movement—when the world thought racism had been dealt with—Americans gave Donald Trump to the world right after Obama lent his Black identity to career opportunist liberal imperialism of the worst kind.
The stockpile of bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others remains Obama's legacy in the Middle East.
As I write, Americans are almost evenly split on the upcoming presidential election, poised to vote for either a Mussolini wannabe rank charlatan fascist or a Genocide Joe replacement who, like a parrot or a broken record, can only repeat AIPAC talking points.
Between a genocidal administration with the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese on its hands and a fascist wannabe, the future of the U.S. and all its global warmongering, particularly its Israeli garrison state, is now being determined.
The significance of what Coates has written weighs far less for Palestinians who have equally if not more eloquent voices to speak on their behalf.
But for Americans, Coates' corrective message may both inspire and signal a broader cultural shift in which this country may be liberated from the curse of Zionism.
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Remembering Gus Newport, A Progressive Titan
The former Berkeley mayor's record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
Jun 20, 2023
Former Berkeley, California Mayor Gus Newport, a titan of progressive politics in the late 20th Century, social justice champion who worked with Malcolm X, and a lifelong humanitarian and internationalist, died June 17 in San Francisco. He was 88.
Gus was the embodiment of the adage of a life well lived. His record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
“The beauty of Gus,” said actor Danny Glover in an interview, “is that I trust him to elevate our story. When you spend time with someone with Gus’s history and character and listen to his stories, you are changed. I hope that a little of my story could resonate with others the way Gus’s stories have resonated with me and so many around the world.”
As a young activist in 1962, leading the Monroe County Nonpartisan League, the largest civil rights group in his hometown of Rochester, NY, Gus shepherded the first successful police brutality case in federal court after the beating of a Black gas station attendant Rufus Fairwell who would win a financial settlement from the city.
Daisy Bates, who led the NAACP campaign to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in the late 1950s and now organizing in Rochester for the NAACP, introduced him to Malcolm X by phone. Gus and Malcolm worked to defend nine Black Muslims assaulted and arrested in a police raid on a Black Muslim Mosque in Rochester during a worship service.
When Malcolm flew into Rochester, and landed on the tarmac on a cold February day, Gus was waiting in the airport surrounded “by a lot of white men in felt hats and white shirts and ties. When Malcolm walked in and asked, ‘who is Gus Newport.’ I raised my hand and said, “I am.” He said, “Young blood, you got the best-tapped telephone in America. This is all FBI around you.”
He would go on to count Malcolm and Harlem Congress member Adam Clayton Powell as mentors. He assisted Malcolm in founding his Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU).
In February 1965, after Malcolm’s house was firebombed, Malcolm asked him to join him for a speech in Rochester about his situation. Returning to New York, “when we landed at LaGuardia, we were met by the chief of police of New York and the fire marshal. They accused him of firebombing his own home.” Four days later Malcolm was assassinated. Later Gus would help Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz with burial and financial support, including with a fundraiser for the family headlined by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Max Roach at the home of Sidney Poitier.
Malcolm, Gus would later say, was “the greatest person I think I ever knew,” a “great teacher” and “one of the dearest friends I ever had.”
Gus would move west after leaving a Department of Labor stint assigned to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, due to a distaste for the politics of President Nixon. A cousin helped him get work for the city of Berkeley, developing youth employment service programs and as a senior analyst in the City Manager’s office and Parks and Recreation department.
In 1979, Gus was elected Berkeley Mayor, with the backing of the progressive Berkeley Citizens Action coalition on a platform of community economic control, serving two terms until 1986. “I never aspired to run for mayor,” he would relate. “I was talked into it by John George, the first African American elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and Congressman Ron Dellums. Danny Glover (who met Gus while interning with the city of Berkeley) and Harry Belafonte (who he had known in New York) helped with my campaigns.”
As Mayor, Gus would lead Berkeley to become the first city in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa, the first city to create a domestic partner benefits program for LGBTQ+ families, a child care initiative to help working women, and innovative programs on affordable housing, rent control, policing reforms, environmental protections, and community development. Berkeley landlords sued to block limits on rent increases the city had enacted. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where Berkeley was represented pro bono by famed Constitutional attorney Lawrence Tribe, “and we won.”
He was one of the first mayors in the country to ride in a Gay Freedom Day parade, in San Francisco in 1979. He also challenged U.S. immigration policy. “The wars in Central America were creating thousands of refugees,” he says, “and I gave orders to our police not to arrest immigrants because of their status.”
As a result of Berkeley and Gus’ prominent role in the broad anti-apartheid movement, he was made an honorary member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and served on the advisory board of the US Conference on Apartheid.
When Mandela first toured the U.S. after his release from prison, Gus was invited to help host Mandela on his visit to Boston, and Glover and Belafonte “introduced me to Mandela.” Gus had worked in Boston after leaving Berkeley as the first senior fellow at the newly founded William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
Gus spent years helping other municipalities on community development projects including in Boston, Seattle, Palm Beach FL, New Hampshire. The Boston area Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, in Roxbury, was a particular success, the only non-profit organization in the U.S. to receive the powers of eminent domain which became a national model for empowering a diverse community and sustainable change profiled in two award-winning films: Holding Ground and Gaining Ground.
He would also serve on the five-person advisory body to oversee the planning to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and teach at Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2009, he gave the commencement speech at Heidelberg University at his alma mater in Tiffin, OH and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
Global peace and social justice was a life long focus for Gus. He was co-chair of the U.S. Peace Council and vice president of the World Peace Council and worked in solidarity with people’s movements, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
He was outspoken in opposition to U.S. policies in Haiti, Cuba, and Central America. In 1985, as mayor, he visited El Salvador, along with a Jesuit priest, with representatives of New El Salvador Today, a group he helped found. “The priest drove us to Chalatenango, and we were told we would walk for an hour, but it took us six hours! When we arrived, the village had no electricity and many roofs were torn off from bombing, but they managed to create a huge sign: ‘Welcome to the Mayor of Berkeley’.”
He was also a prominent supporter of Palestinian rights, as a long time board member of the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. In 2019 Gus was awarded the Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award by the Arab American Institute.
During the 2016 election, Gus and Danny Glover traveled across the U.S. as national surrogates for the Presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Gus had developed a friendship with Sanders after Bernie was elected mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981. They also collaborated with the few other progressive mayors, including Chicago’s Harold Washington, at U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. “We’d compare notes on public policy, community planning, and organizing.”
In his later years, Gus served on the leadership committee of the National Council of Elders, an organization of people over 65 dedicated to advancing civil, women’s, environmental, farm workers, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Gus maintained a connection to Oakland and the East Bay, from the early 1990s living on and off in Oakland with his longtime wife and partner Kathryn Kasch. He was on the board of the Urban Studies Council, a Bay Area regional policy and research organization, focused on addressing inequities. In one of his last roles, Gus served on Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, formed after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Asked what kept him working for a better world in the face of so many threats from white supremacy and assaults on democracy, Gus would say he was guided by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a Beloved Community of inclusion, cooperation and justice for all which he had first imbued from his parents and grandmother. “We need to come back to what Martin called Building the Beloved Community — helping communities address education, incarceration, mental and physical health in an integrated and systematic way. If we want a better future for the next generation, we need to build a movement that is strategic and constant!”
In interviews he frequently talked about the inspiration of his grandmother who took him to concerts with Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson when he was five. “My grandmother grew up in the Jim Crow South,” he noted. “One day, after picking cotton, she came to school late and the teacher slapped her. She walked out and never went back.”
“I’m lucky enough for what my grandmother instilled in me: Don’t think you know it all, learn something new every day. I learned it by engaging with people and having an analysis and understanding the integrated role that can be played by communities, universities, government, all kinds of people. We don’t live in a community that has reached its limit as to what’s best.”
To hear Gus in his own words, watch a 2021 interview with the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum.
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Remembering Slain Peace and Justice Activists on This--and Every--Memorial Day
Let us remember those who died fighting for human rights and a better world.
May 25, 2020
The Progressive Editor's note: This commentary first appeared on the website of The Progressive on May 27, 2013. This year on Memorial Day, we repost it in memory of all people working for change in our world--some are honored and remembered, others lesser known. Some are quiet essential workers, risking their lives while helping individuals day-to-day in this time of global pandemic.
For Memorial Day, it is customary to remember the soldiers who died for our country.
But I'm not one for custom, so, on this day, I'd like to remember the peace and justice activists who died for our country.
I remember, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy.
I remember Medgar Evers, an organizer with the NAACP, who was gunned down in Mississippi in 1963 while wearing a t-shirt that said, "Jim Crow Must Go."
I remember James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered in 1964 for trying to register black citizens to vote in Mississippi.
I remember Mark Clark and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, murdered by Chicago cops in 1969.
I remember Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, slain at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970.
I remember Phillip Gibbs and James Green, slain by police at Jackson State just 11 days later.
I remember Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, murdered by Pinochet's thugs in Chile in 1973.
I remember Karen Silkwood, anti-nuclear activist, killed in a highly suspicious car crash in 1974.
I remember Ben Linder, killed by the contras in Nicaragua in 1987.
I remember Judi Bari, one of the leaders of Earth First!, killed by a bomb in her car in 1999.
I remember Rachel Corrie, crushed to death ten years ago by an Israeli armored bulldozer in Gaza.
They all deserve a Memorial Day salute.
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