Notorious race grifter Ta-Nehisi Coates said that if he was born in Gaza, he didn’t know if he would have been “strong enough” to have abstained from joining in raping, torturing, and murdering women, children, and the elderly, as Palestinian terrorists did on October 7, 2023.

During a Thursday interview with Trevor Noah on his What Now? podcast to discuss Coates’ anti-Israel book The Message, the conversation focused on the controversy surrounding a chapter about the author’s trip "to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives."

The chapter discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and heavily favors the Palestinian side to the point of echoing Hamas’ talking points. It takes up about half the book and is based on a 10 day he took of the region. He boiled the whole conflict down to white man bad, just like he has in the US.

Coates said, “I haven't said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Were I, 20 years old, born into Gaza, which he falsely described as “a giant open-air jail” before crafting a slanted narrative about a hypothetical family where his “fisherman” father who if he “goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off of, you know, the side of Israeli boats,” a similarly described “mother” who “picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot,” and a "sister" with cancer without access to treatment, ignoring that hospitals are used by terrorists to store weapons and conceal terror tunnels so Palestinians regularly receive treatment in Israel, the anti-Israel author wondered if he would grow up to be a terrorist.

Coates asked, "I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down, 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.” Noah agreed as Coates repeated, “I don't know that I am.” Noah then compared the Oct. 7 massacre to the American Revolution. To be clear, it was a massacre of innocent people during a time of relative peace between the two peoples.

The conversation was in response to an interview Coates did to promote his book earlier in the week on CBS News, during which anchor Tony Dokoupil challenged the author for leaving out basic facts about the conflict. Dokoupil said, "When I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” 

He continued, "So then I found myself wondering, why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. Is it because you just don't believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?"

Coates responded that he sought to give a voice to the Palestinian people, whose views he claimed were underrepresented in US media. Dokoupil received backlash from CBS News staff, who felt the Jewish anchor pushed back too harshly on Coates anti-Israel bias.

The network attempted to quell the employee revolt during a staff meeting on Monday, the one-year anniversary since the October 7 massacre in Israel where Palestinian terrorists breached the border wall and killed over 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 more. Almost 100 hostages, including at least 8 Americans, remain in Hamas captivity.

According to The Free Press, which obtained audio of the staff meeting, CBS leadership told the offended staff members that the interview didn’t meet the company’s "editorial standards."

Puck Media reporter Dylan Byers said that CBS employees are required to run questions by its Race and Culture unit. "The unit, led by Alvin Patrick, determined that while Dokoupil’s questions and intentions were acceptable, his tone was not. Meanwhile, the network’s Standards and Practices division, led by Claudia Milne, determined that Dokoupil had not followed the preproduction process wherein questions are run through Race and Culture and Standards and Practices."

Further complicating the matter, internal emails obtained by The Free Press revealed this week CBS News executives ordered its staff not to say Israel's capital city of Jerusalem is in Israel. 

Another CBS internal email on “standards guidance” obtained by Free Press founder Bari Weiss dated Oct 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas atrocities, told staff, “Reporting on this weekend's violence in Israel and Gaza requires a closer look at the language we use when describing events. For instance, the US government considers Hamas a terrorist organization; however, suggesting an individual is a terrorist may be inaccurate depending on the facts.”

The guidance continued, “There are some who believe the attack by Hamas is a justified retaliation to Israeli occupation of their lands. Others believe this to be an unprovoked attack on Israel and as such Israel has every right to defend itself."