Anti-racist activist suggests he might have participated in Oct. 7 attacks if he grew up in Gaza

Anti-racist polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates says he doesn’t know if he would have been “strong enough’’ to not join in the Oct.7 massacre if he’d grown up in Gaza.“Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail … and I grew up under that oppression and that poverty and that wall comes down — am I even strong enough … where I say, ‘This is too far’?” the McArthur Genius Grant-winning author, 49, said Thursday on ex-”Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s podcast “What Now.”The “Between the World and Me’’ author suggested that what might not have been “too far’’ for him was the slaughter of more than 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and the kidnapping of over 250 others, including elderly Holocaust survivors and babies, at the hands of Hamas terrorists.“If my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off … the side of Israeli boats,’’ the controversial scribe said, referring to what he believes life is like for Palestinians in Gaza.“If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the [border] wall, she might be shot.

If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don’t get the right permits she might die …”Coates, a former professor at NYU and CUNY, said that while he considers the Oct.7 atrocities to be a “great horror,” on the other hand, the attacks were in response to an unbearable Israeli system of “apartheid.”“If you start asking why [the attack happened], then you really, really start to get into trouble,” he told Noah.“Human life really, really matters to me.

… And if human life matters on Oct.7, it should matter on Oct.

6 and Oct.5, too, and understanding that it didn’t’’ is crucial to seeing the bigger picture, he said — appearing to be expressing empathy for the perpetrators of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.Coates, who is ...