While CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s colleague Tony Dokoupil was never explicitly mentioned, he loomed over Colbert’s Wednesday interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates as the duo discussed reaction to his anti-Israel book on The Late Show. Coates, for his part, was unrepentant as he defended the decision to leave out any mention of terrorism when discussing the current situation in the West Bank.
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Still, Colbert asked, “You talk about the power of writing, you talk about the importance of journalism and you also talk about how the mainstream media misuses that power in your opinion on how they tell this story. Why do you think that is being misused? Why do you think they don't tell the story that you saw?”
Coates responded by analogizing the West Bank to segregation, “I think it’s extremely, extremely, extremely difficult to orient yourself to two things. The first is that there is segregation there, and the second is that the group of people who are doing it are the descendants in collective of one of the greatest crimes ever committed in human history. We would like to believe that when people do harmful or hurtful things, they are just mean people doing harmful and hurtful things. It's much more disturbing to orient yourself around the idea that victims are actually victimizing. That's, I think, tough — that's a very generous — that's the most generous interpretation.”
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