It's All So Complicated

No it really isn't.

Coates’s friends, I noticed, were eager to attest to the extraordinary amount of research that went into The Message, undoubtedly anticipating that Coates’s relatively recent interest in the subject may become a point of criticism. “It’s not a book that reads like someone who just parachuted in, read one or two things, and started making a lot of sweeping statements,” Beinart told me. But, of course, Coates did parachute in, and one could argue that this provides the book’s greatest asset — its sense of revelation, its portrait of the new in all its shameful splendor. The point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice of the occupation. “What is the experience that justifies total rule over a group of people since 1967?” he asked me. “My mother knows that’s wrong.”