Ta-Nehisi Coates is reportedly an admirer of author and critic Stanley Crouch but readers have cause to wonder. Crouch, who passed away in 2020, would not have approved Coates’ equation of Israel with the Jim Crow south in his new book The Message. Crouch would also deploy his considerable powers against the current surge of anti-Semitism. Should that be doubted, consider “Nationalism of Fools,” Crouch’s 1985 essay in the Village Voice:
The Nation of Islam offered a rageful revision that would soon have far more assenters than converts. Though it seemed at first only a fanatical cult committed to a bizarre version of Islam, Elijah Muhammad’s homemade Nation was far from an aberration.
Where others explained the world’s problems with complex theories ranging from economic exploitation to sexism, Muhammad simply pinned the tail on the white man. In his view, black integrationists were only asking for membership in hell, since the white man was a devil “grafted” from black people in an evil genetic experiment by a mad, pumpkin-headed scientist named Yacub. That experiment took place 6000 years ago. Now the white man was doomed, sentenced to destruction by Allah.
Neither [Martin Luther] King nor any reputable people doing serious work would have anything to do with the Nation of Islam. It was too racist and too much of an intellectual embarrassment.
Readers can find the essay in Crouch’s Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989, and there’s something else worthy of note. The Madison Square Garden event with Farrakhan included Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who spoke first:
He bobbed and flailed, often pushing his head past the microphone. The sound went up and down; some sentences came through clearly, others were half-heard. He attacked Zionism, calling for war against Israel and recognition of the “sacredness” of Africa, where Moses and Jesus were protected when in trouble.
But then much of what Carmichael has had to say since the black power years has been itself a black diet, a form of intellectual starvation in which the intricacies of international politics are reduced to inflammatory tribalism.
Also appearing was “Palestinian” speaker, Said Arafat, who “attacked Zionism as ‘a cancer’ and called for ‘the total liberation of Palestine.'”
Across Europe and America, anti-Semitism now surges to levels that Crouch detected in Madison Square Garden in 1985:
Yet one image remained in the front of my mind: this light-skinned young man wearing a camouflage shirt and pants, brown fringe sewn across the shoulders, studded black leather covering his forearms. Whenever Farrakhan said something about “the Jews,” that young man screamed or shouted, pushing both fists into the air, frequently leaping to his feet. Near the end of the evening, when I had moved down toward the stage and was preparing to leave, I looked up and saw him once again. The front of his eight-inch-wide black belt bore a large Star of David formed in studs.
https://www.powerlineblog.com//arcihevs2024/10/an-antidote-to-coates.php
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