Indeed, The Message may well be the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published. Each turn of phrase oozes with a loathing of the Jewish state. As with his previous work, history is a poetic truth in which white people are innately and inexorably evil — the Jew perhaps most of all.

Coates, in fact, severs the Holocaust from Jewish history, as if this is within his power, noting that he sees “Yad Vashem at a distance from Israel itself” because of “echoes to white supremacy, colonial roots, its apartheid policies.” Even a casual student of history knows this rendering of Zionism is absurdly juvenile. But it is his telling of the Palestinian plight that is criminally misleading. 

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.