DAVID HARSANYI READ “THE MESSAGE” SO YOU WOULDN’T HAVE TO: The racist protocols of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Palestinians of The Message are uncannily peaceful, yearning to write poetry and plow the “sacred land” beneath their feet. Nowhere in his book, not once, does Coates bother mentioning “Hamas” despite writing it right after one of the largest massacres of Jews in history. Nowhere in his polemic about the Palestinian struggle does Coates type the words “Palestinian Liberation Organization” or “PLO” or “Fatah,” much less “Hezbollah” or “Iran.” “Yasser Arafat” wasn’t important enough to make an appearance.

Because Coates distances himself from the Holocaust, his readers will be blissfully unaware of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who personally implored Adolf Hitler to “burn” the Jews of Europe years before Israel ever existed. It would, no doubt, be a heavy lift for Coates to explain why Arab pogroms occurred with regularity before the “occupied territories” or “Nakba.”

The word “terrorist” makes one appearance in the entirety of The Message, and it is preceded by the word “Zionist.”

Because of course.