"This a profoundly disappointing, and even dangerous, book, in a time when anti-semitic propaganda is at its highest point since the Holocaust. In _The Message_s longest essay, a frighteningly misguided and non-researched essay about Palestine from the point of view of the terrorist, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets things very, very wrong -- not just factually, but also ethically.

In _The Message_, Ta-Nehisi Coates transforms the aggressor into the victim. He denies the reality of the most powerful and aggressive conquering force in the modern world--extremist Islamists--and falls into the lazy mass media dynamic of confusing peaceful Muslims with terrorist Islamists.

These Islamists, led by the Islamists who violently conquered Iran and numerous other countries surrounding Israel, murder peaceful Middle Eastern people on a daily basis. Dr. Coates could benefit from understanding the context-- that the same Islamist terrorists that seek to destroy Israel (it's in their Charter which Coates declines to read) actually murder more Muslims than any other religious group. The same terrorist Islamists seeking to destroy Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, also violently oppress indigenous people in Yemen (Houthis), Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iran, and in a dozen other countries, using Muslim people as human shields and violently destabilizing countries. This is not complicated.

What is baffling is how Coates's pathological drive to defend wrongdoers deprives him of his abiity to advocate on behalf of Christians, Muslims, and all other indigenous people who as I write are living under terrorist-enforced Sharia law, murdered for being gay, for being a woman, or for being anything other than extremist Islamist. Ever contemplate what it is like being female and/or gay in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, or any of the other multitude of countries conquered by Islamists and run under Sharia law? Perhaps Coates could benefit from considering this question.

But Dr. Coates does not open his eyes. Bizarrely, he justifies his (admitted!) willful blindness about the situation in Israel and the West Bank by means of claiming that the emotional resonance of his 10-day trip (led by anti-Israel activists) is sufficient for him to make sweeping generalizations and ill-informed conclusions. This diverges wildly from his previous work, which was extraordinarily well-documented and which demonstrated his commitment to see historical events from many perspectives. If he contained his work to emotional resonance instead of factual misstatements, I would be on board with his strategy. Nonetheless, he uses his slanted 10-day trip to make provably incorrect assumptions and harmful, bigoted, sweeping conclusions.

Perhaps the most striking and troubling perceptional and intellectual error Coates makes is in his conflation of the situation in the West Bank with Gaza. While admitting he never visited Gaza, and omitting reference to Hamas's deadly massacre on Simchat Torah, he assumes that the disputed territories faced similar circumstances. Coates could open the newspaper or read a book; he is shamefully misguided: the West Bank is occupied, but Gaza has not been occupied for almost 20 years.

Specifically: Israel has been occupying the West Bank as a disputed territory ever since Israel successfully defended itself from the invasion by terrorists in 1967. Many Israelis claimed the right to the West Bank as a result of a war it did not start. Some consider the occupation of the West Bank to be necessary to protect Israel from the terrorist groups that still seek to destroy Israel, in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran (and elsewhere!). Many zionists seek a more peaceful resolution to the West Bank, where all people can live peacefully, yet Israel nonetheless is protected from terrorists. There is no unity of opinion about the West Bank by Israelis or Jews or ZIONISTS. Coates gets this entirely wrong.

Not only that, but Coates also conflates the controversial situation in the West Bank with the Gaza Strip, which has not been occupied for almost 20 years. Israel completely pulled all troups and even displaced all Jews who had been living in Gaza in 2007. There was no "resistance to occupation" in Gaza because there was no occupation when Hamas invaded Israel and murdered and raped thousands of innocent people. Gaza had been left alone. Yet Coates sympathizes and hero-worships the rapists and murderers who broke a 20-year cease fire in response to absolutely nothing other than their desire to wipe Israel off the map (something, need I repeat, that it states in its charter!).

How is that complicated?

(Sidebar facts: the West Bank was actually a part of Jordan until Jordan relinquished all claim to it in 1950, yet there has been no criticism of Jordan for abandoning a large community of its people. Similarly, Gaza had been under the control of Egypt until Egypt abandoned it in 1967. Scholars believe that both Arab countries relinquished their former territories due to the growing presence of destabilizing terrorist activities, traced largely to what is now known as the Islamist Republic of Iran, which funds dozens of terror organizations including Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and so on. Facts.)

Coates does not care about facts. He conflates the West Bank with Gaza, and uses that to justify the rape and murder of thousands of innocent people, which he says he may have PARTICIPATED in. He incorrectly claims that all Zionists seek to annex the West Bank (some do, but many do not), calls all Zionists racist (why? why?) and calls for the destruction of the State of Israel -- a postage-stamp sized plot of mainly non-irragable land smaller than New Jersey, on a football-field sized geographic region of Arab countries where -- a very relevant point -- Jews are not allowed. Being a zionist means that one believes that Jews should have the ability to survive as an ethnicity. If advocating for a minority religion to avoid extermination is racist, then ... I cannot imagine a way to end that sentence.

Coates does not care. Although not all Zionists agree that the West Bank should be occupied, ALL (as does anyone with knowledge) agree that Gaza was not under occupation when Hamas invaded Israel and cruelly and inhumanely killed, tortured and raped so many people. Even if Gaza were under occupation (which it was not), there is no defense for rape, torture, and murder of human beings, and Coates should know that. There is NOTHING that can justify the rape, torture, and murder of people.

Given Coates's previous works, which I greatly respected and enjoyed, including _Between The World and Me_, I was surprised to see Dr. Coates's decline into mainstream propaganda. While his previous work was commendable and enlightening, this book is irresponsible, non-researched and dangerous to all people truly fighting for freedom and peace from terrorism in the Middle East.

In sum, while Coates claims he writes only what he knows, he is either profoundly self-unaware or intentionally lying. This is a very low point for a professor of ethics. Coates is so desperate to blame Israel for Hamas's egregious inhumanity that he embraces antisemitic lies to do so. While this thinking is dangerously common amongst mass media and social media content creators, it is also unethical, lazy, and incorrect. Coates, based on his previous work, should have known better.

Coates's statement that he may have been one of the terrorists that invaded a separate country, murdered and raped children, teenagers, babies, the elderly and so many more, and continue TO THIS DAY to hold more than 100 people, including women and children, hostage under the most inhumane conditions, reflects a complete destruction of his mind and soul. That he wrote this and defends it is shocking and horrifying. And the more he is called to task on his indefensible comments, the more he will reinforce his pathological views by defending them. I don't know if he can come back from this.

I rated Dr. Coates' previous book _Between the World and Me_ five stars, and put it in my short "Best of the Best" collection. How a thoughtful, insightful thinker could lose his way so much could be the subject of a different book I would like to read in the future. I wish him the clarity he used to have and now lacks."

"I wanted to love this book but unfortunately, I ended up disliking it. One thing I did like is the writing style, the writer has his way with words, and it is evident that he is very well-read but most importantly you can feel his raw emotion in what he writes. I won't get in the detail of politics of USA and police brutality that this book critiques but I will point out a few things that really bothered me.

First of all, the way Coastes formed his world views is in my opinion highly influenced by the trauma he experienced as a child by perpetual mishandling and beating by his parents. That is the fact he is completely unaware of as you see him defending his parents and justifying them by explaining that they were conditioned by collective social pathology.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us.

This is a dangerous reasoning author tries to implement into the reader. If your society is in some way unjust - it is okay and understandable for you to brutally and perpetually beat your child. I'm strictly against all kinds of child beating, and even to set aside emotional aspects, there is an immense body of scientific evidence of the long-lasting detrimental effects that child abuse has on both mental and physical health.

Authors unaddressed and unacknowledged trauma leads him in a world view of American society as hateful, racist, aiming to destroy black people. He paints the atmosphere of his upbringing as an atmosphere of hell, only blaming society for it, even though he personally never had an encounter with the police. I want to point out that I don't say this things are not true, but ideas that have particles of truth while being distorted with unconscious disillusion are especially dangerous. In a psychiatric manner, one could say he is projecting the brutality of his parents to the police, directing anger he should be feeling about his abuse as a child to the police and the whole political system. He even idolizes parents and their way of behavior as adequate and correct, which were I completely lost it!

Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra—“Either I can beat him or the police.�� I understood it all—the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.

I don't even need to address how fatal can be to have such unconscious elements forming one's political beliefs and then projected on the outside world (read Hitler or Stalin biography). Born in the nation that heavily projects onto our neighbor-nation we've been to war with, I can see the magnitude of the negative effect of that kind of psychological reasoning and victim mentality. There is no progress while you are always focused on the ''unjust/vile'' other. In that state, one's own introjected tyrant figures seem to be omnipresent in the outside world, and that almost always creates a dangerous paranoid perception that the collective is set to destroy you. And the world in which you think only your enemies prosper deserves to burn.

I think Coates subconsciously promotes the pathological side of victim mentality - it is an absolute fact that the black people are victims of the past, history, societies, and that racism is much present even in this day - but that does not entitle one to become a hateful individual that wishes pain and suffering to other. That leads me to the other part of the book that infuriated me - the way Coates described 9/11 victims, almost as he thinks these people deserved their destiny due to the things the state did to the people of color. Here I find his reasoning again very incoherent - he is against violence, but implicitly says that the white race deserves punishment due to the committed crimes - obviously even completely random and innocent people. He is against racism and stripping someone of humanity due to the color of his skin, but does exactly the same due to someone's profession.

Everyone knew someone who knew someone who was missing. But looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I had disasters all my own. The officer who killed Prince Jones, like all the officers who regard us so warily, was the sword of the American citizenry. I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city. I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part. Only a community of right-thinking black people stopped them. I had not formed any of this into a coherent theory. But I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city. I never forgot that. Neither should you. In the days after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen, the overwrought slogans. Damn it all. Prince Jones was dead. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. Hell for ancestral fear that put black parents under terror. And hell upon those who shatter the holy vessel. I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me.

When I read books, I tend to read them empathetically - I try to put myself in other person shoes, doing that while reading this book made me extremely miserable, living in a word-view of deeply rooted resentment and extreme bleakness. I do get why author is as he is, but because of that, I don't want to justify his alarming beliefs.

I know my opinions are somewhat controversial as I see the majority of people are wholeheartedly praising this book, but I wanted to point out these things that can easily go under the radar. I hope that people can allow themselves to read this book critically even though there so much emotional context related to the topics discussed. I empathize with the author, but because of that, I would want him to be truly free, not only from the external but also internal oppression."

"I opened this book expecting to find a reasoned analysis of the situation in which many black Americans find themselves today, along with a reasonable set of recommended solutions to their problems. That is not what I found at all. I read the book because I saw and heard Mr. Coates on several TV news and talk shows, and I thought he might have something of value to contribute to the national discussion. I was wrong.

Mr. Coates is a very angry man. His ideas have been shaped by other angry men. He is every bit as warped as the most virulent of white supremacists. The only difference is that he is bent in a different direction. This book is nothing more than a hate-filled diatribe that seeks to blame white America for all of the problems that can currently be found within the black culture and community in the United States.

In the book, the author portrays a white America that is totally removed from reality. He describes brooks running through the back yards of white children, and white boys pushing their toy trucks through the trees adjoining those brooks. I don’t know how to tell him this, but there is a great deal of white America that comes nowhere near this idyllic dream of how white Americans live. This world exists only in the sick mind of Mr. Coates.

Coates apparently used the shooting death of Michael Brown as the inspiration to write this book. He constantly harks back to this event throughout the book, making allegations and implications that are without merit. Never mind that Michael Brown has been proven to have been a criminal and a thug who committed a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store, walked down the middle of a street intended for motor vehicles (which is probably against the law in every city in America), refused to obey a lawful order from a police officer, physically fought with that officer through the open window of a police cruiser, attempted to seize the officer’s firearm, caused the firearm to discharge at least twice while it was still inside the vehicle, and then turned and charged the officer when that officer attempted to detain and arrest him. Coates takes none of these facts into consideration in his hateful screed, insisting, instead, that the shooting death of Michael Brown was unjustified. He ignores the fact that a lot of people who have read the transcript of the Grand Jury hearings believe otherwise, as did the Grand Jury, itself.

Mr. Coates emphasizes the fact that the body of Michael Brown remained in the street for more than four hours, and that the police did nothing to remove it. He ignores the fact that, under Missouri Law, nobody but a Coroner, Medical Examiner or a member of that person’s staff is allowed to move or remove a body when a crime might be involved. This is also true of many other jurisdictions, and Coates could have learned this had he made any attempt to do so. It took a significant amount of time to complete the crime scene investigations, and for the Medical Examiner’s staff to remove the body, and this is often the case in smaller jurisdictions that must rely on a Coroner or ME from a different jurisdiction. It is unfortunate that the system works this way, but it does. Mr. Coates would do well to spend less time whining and more time learning about how his governments work at all levels. The color of the skin of the victim makes absolutely no difference to the operation of a Coroner or Medical Examiner’s office. With limited resources, they do their jobs the best they can, and if it had been a white person who had been killed, the body would probably have remained at the scene for the same amount of time.

The author goes on to blame the school system where he attended school for many of the problems that he faced later in his life. He believes that the courses and curriculum offered by schools should be tailored specifically for black people who, presumably, share his philosophies. This, rather than to impart the knowledge that history has shown us that humans need in order to succeed and thrive. How selfish and self-centered is that? Never mind that white kids probably sat in the same classrooms and studied the same course work taught by the same teachers as Coates, but probably did not feel that they were cheated out of an education.

Mr. Coates projects his own hatreds, his own anger, his own fears onto all black people. What gives him this right �� the right to speak for all African-Americans? He says it! On page #29 he says: “all black people.�� He’s just wrong. There are many black people who did not grow up with the hate, the anger, and the fear that Coates describes. President Barack Obama comes to mind. As does General Colin Powell, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and many, many more.

Many of the conclusions reached by the author and related in the book are based on false assumptions. On one page, for example, Coates talks about the first black “five star general.�� To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a black five star general because there have been only five five-star generals in US history: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Bradley, Arnold, and Marshall. I don’t believe that any of them was black. The rank of five-star general was created in 1944. Generals who carried the title of “General of the Army�� wore only four stars before 1944. In addition, four US Navy Admirals were granted the rank of five stars during WWII. None of them was black. There are no five-star generals of any skin color serving today because it is a temporary rank that is only granted during wartime. Coates has not done the research expected and required for such a serious book.

On page #83 of the book, the author acknowledges that the member of the Prince George’s Police Deportment who shot and killed his friend Prince Jones “was black,�� saying: “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. How could this be?�� Even though he says this, he is able to blame white America for the death, and for all problems in the black community. It makes absolutely no sense, and I do not understand his reasoning at all. Coates then goes on to make a point of claiming that no criminal charges were ever filed against the officer who killed his friend, and that is true. Coates fails to mention, however, that a civil damages suit against the officer and the county was successful, and Prince Jones�� daughter will receives a total of $4.6 million in damages to be paid in regular installments until she reaches the age of 40. The Prince George’s County undercover narcotics corporal was found to be civilly responsible for Jones�� wrongful death.

On page #86 of his book, Coates revealingly tells us that: “I would never consider any American citizen pure.�� He says it in the context of blaming all of America for the death of his friend Prince Jones. He apparently reaches this conclusion while standing on the roof of his apartment watching the plumes of smoke rising from the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. I found his words to be a startling revelation of the amount of hatred in his heart. On the very next page, Coates goes on to tell us that: “I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died.�� How warped and twisted is it to compare American heroes to somebody who was, in all likelihood, a cold-blooded murderer?

The author describes walking through his neighborhoods in Flatbush, in Harlem, in Baltimore, and having to deal with the “same boys with the same bop, the same ice grill, and the same code�� that he had known all his life. Even though all of these boys that he refers to are black, he still blames all of his problems on the white race. Coates has apparently concluded that all evils perpetrated against black people, or white people, is done so by other white people. This idea is so patently absurd and false that it is beyond reason. In Africa, for example, there are terrorist groups that commit terrible acts of violence and evil against the population, and against anybody else that they can find, including innocent white shoppers at a mall in Kenya. These groups are predominantly black. Boko Haram is just one example of such a group. al-Shabaab is another. Coates probably has never heard of them because he is so narrowly-focused.

The author’s thoughts and narrative ignore the fact that non-whites and non-blacks routinely perpetrate vicious acts of violence and evil against other members of the same race. North Korea is an example. Perhaps Coates has never heard of North Korea. Maybe he knows nothing at all about the Taliban, or al-Qaeda. Or, in spite of his referral to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he knows nothing at all about the Gulag and its forced labor camps in Siberia. Does he believe that the inmates who are held there in slavery are all black?

The author repeatedly refers to the myth of Trayvon Martin. He compares Martin to Prince Jones. Actually, there is no comparison, and if Coates had bothered to watch the George Zimmerman trial, or if he had bothered to read the trial transcripts, he, too, could know the truth about Trayvon Martin. The two incidents were totally different with absolutely no relationship to each other. It seems like whenever something bad happens to a black man, Coates universally blames it on white racism. Trayvon Martin was killed by a Hispanic man who was trying to defend himself from a brutal assault. What does that have to do with the white race? What does it have to do with the police? What does it have to do with the death of Prince Jones, who might very well have been murdered.

The author seems to be keenly aware of the black experience in two large Eastern American cities: Baltimore and New York. He also seems to be very familiar with the history of black slavery in the Southern United States up to and through the Civil War. However, he seems to be totally unaware of the human experience in other parts of the world, including the Far East, the Middle East, Europe and many other places. His perspective is, therefore, very, very narrow.

On pages #108 and #109 Coates describes the heart-rending eviction of a black family from its home in Chicago. He tries to convey the sense that only black people ever get evicted from their homes. The very first real eviction that I ever saw or heard of was when I watched one of my neighbors, a white man, be evicted from his longtime family home. Several of my neighbors lost their homes and were evicted after the Great Recession of 2008. None of them was black. Evictions take place every day somewhere in the United States. Not all of those being evicted are black, contrary to the author’s attempt to convince us otherwise. I feel pity for Coates, but I feel even more pity for his son, who is doomed to grow up in a household dominated by two emotions: hatred and anger.

On pages #111 through #113 the author, as is his way, relates an incomplete, twisted, and inaccurate portrayal of the shooting death of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida. Coates says: ��. . . the killer was convicted not of the boy’s murder but of firing repeatedly as the boy’s friends attempted to retreat.�� He then continued: “Destroying the black body was permissible �� but it would be better to do it efficiently.�� The truth of the matter is that the killer, a man named Michael David Dunn, was actually convicted of one count of first degree murder, three counts of attempted second degree murder, and one count of shooting into a car. He has been sentenced to a term of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The killer did not escape justice. It appears, then, that destroying a black body is not permissible at all. How many of you who have, or will, read this book would know that Coates is being dishonest on this matter? It is clear that he sees everything through the prism of race.

Coates certainly could have done what I, and probably many others, did and downloaded the trial and grand jury hearing transcripts so that he could learn the truth. He didn’t. Coates could have heard the same sworn testimony that the jury heard in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial, but he didn’t. He prefers to wallow in his hatred and his anger, perpetuating lies and distortions because they fit with his sick, twisted world view. Then, he compares a proven thug, strong-arm robber of convenience stores, and assaulter of a police officer to his own son? How sick is that? Is he raising a thug and a criminal?

Unless you have a high tolerance for sick, twisted propaganda, you should probably skip this book. It is a hate-filled screed that is not worthy of attention from reasonable, sane readers."