Anti-racist polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates says he doesn’t know if he would have been “strong enough’’ to not join in the Oct. 7 massacre if he’d grown up in Gaza.
“Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail … and I grew up under that oppression and that poverty and that wall comes down — am I even strong enough … where I say, ‘This is too far’?” the MacArthur “Genius” Grant-winning author, 49, said Thursday on ex-”Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s podcast “What Now.”
The “Between the World and Me’’ author suggested that what might not have been “too far’’ for him was the slaughter of more than 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and the kidnapping of over 250 others, including elderly Holocaust survivors and babies, at the hands of Hamas terrorists.
“If my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off … the side of Israeli boats,’’ the controversial scribe said, referring to what he believes life is like for Palestinians in Gaza.
“If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the [border] wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don’t get the right permits, she might die …”
Coates, a former professor at NYU and CUNY, said that while he considers the Oct. 7 atrocities to be a “great horror,” on the other hand, the attacks were in response to an unbearable Israeli system of “apartheid.”
“If you start asking why [the attack happened], then you really, really start to get into trouble,” he told Noah.
“Human life really, really matters to me. … And if human life matters on Oct. 7, it should matter on Oct. 6 and Oct. 5, too, and understanding that it didn’t’’ is crucial to seeing the bigger picture, he said — appearing to be expressing empathy for the perpetrators of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Coates, who is promoting his new book “The Message,” said those who try to justify Israel’s cruel treatment of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank as combating terrorism are simply justifying “apartheid.”
“Either you think there are good reasons for segregations, Jim Crowe, apartheid or you don’t,’’ said the author, who helped write Marvel’s “Black Panther” comics series and whose “Between the World and Me” won a National Book Award in 2015.
The author likened the Oct. 7 attacks to the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831 that killed 55 people, including children.
“I think killing babies in the crib is wrong, but that doesn’t justify slavery,” he said.
Online critics slammed his comments.
“When your moral clarity leads you to this, my god,” wrote Bard College humanities Professor Thomas Chatterton Williams on X.
“I cannot imagine killing innocent people and eating the food out of their refrigerators in front of their crying children,’’ the prof added, referring to Oct. 7.
“I’m actually pretty certain I couldn’t ever do that.’’
Columbia business Professor Shai Davidai wrote, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is not above raping young women at a music festival in the name of ‘resistance,’ ” referring to one of the Oct. 7 attacks that left hundreds dead at the Nova fest.
Among other things, Coates is famous for “Between the World and Me,” a book written as a letter from a father to his son trying to explain racial injustice.
Known for his attacks on white supremacy, the author — who also put together the 2017 “We Were Eight Years in Power,” a collection of essays he penned during the Obama White House — has taken hits from black activists such as Cornel West.
“Who’s the ‘we’? When’s the last time he’s been through the ghetto, in the ‘hoods, to the schools and indecent housing and mass unemployment?” West told the New York Times Magazine in 2017.
“We were in power for eight years? My God. Maybe he and some of his friends might have been in power, but not poor working people.”
Coates’ comments to Noah come in the midst of ongoing fallout over his contentious interview on “CBS Mornings” with host Tony Dokoupil regarding his latest book, which devotes a significant section to the Holy Land.
“If I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim … the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said to Coates during the heated segment.
CBS news bosses later reprimanded Dokoupil, saying his treatment of Coates violated their editorial standards.
Critics of the Noah interview also took issue with the podcast host’s criticism of Dokoupil’s grilling of Coates, in which he claimed that you could also consider the Boston Tea Party a terrorist attack if you removed the context.
“If you remove every context from everything, then everything can go anywhere,’’ Noah said.
“If you remove America’s history … then yeah, those people who fought against the British were terrorists. You can call it the Boston Tea Party, but that’s terrorism.”
Noah went on to accuse an unnamed Israel-supporting friend of supporting apartheid and claimed that terrorism was not a sufficient reason for Israel’s actions.
“I’m yet to find a thing that happened in our past that didn’t have a ‘because,’ ” the comedian said.