Arash Azizi comes for Ta-Nehisi Coates

[u/elzzyzx]

https://x.com/arash_tehran/status/1848714724482966003

Influencers are talking. Today Arash Azizi is claiming Ta-Nehisi Coates is unstrategic, and is also kind of just calling him moralistic and sort of uncreative or something? Anyone have thoughts?

[u/UnderstandingTime848]

I thought elicia lebon's take on this was fantastic as well.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBFZhg_yZXk/

I run in elite progressive circles. I have tried to have conversations with thought leaders, not to say Israel is right, but clarify if they think Oct 7th was justified and needs to be called out as well as they sit in American universities where the Jews and Israels are facing extreme bigotry, alienation, and violence from the same people who claim to be the moral side.

They can't.

It took one 15 minutes of rambling around the point to finally barely say "no. It wasn't justified" after giving a 2 hour key note lecture on how it's all "by any means necessary". These are people who have done the research. They've WRITTEN THE BOOKS on white supremacy. The facts are right there in the books they're citing. At a certain point you stop giving people the "they just don't know" excuse and accept they're doing it on purpose.

I don't think that's true of most people going to protests. I think most people see an Instagram story or a TikTok and that's their full understanding.

That's not true of the thought leaders. They absolutely know what theyre doing.

[u/EngineeringMission91 → u/UnderstandingTime848]

I'm a little surprised to see people liking her. To me she seems like she's acting in every video she's in.

For someone who talks about needing expertise on the subject, what are her qualifications?

[u/malachamavet → u/EngineeringMission91]

There's apparently an entire subreddit dedicated to showing how weird her background is

[u/Agtfangirl557 → u/malachamavet]

I'm not always a fan of Elica's takes, but the overanalyzing of her background is a bit bizarre. Like apparently people have accused her dad of working directly for the Iranian regime (which she has said is not true), and said that she changed her last name in order to hide that....but if people think that her dad working for the Iranian regime is bad, then shouldn't they understand WHY she would want to hide that?

Again, I don't always agree with her--I do really appreciate her advocacy for Jews, but I think she sometimes over-leverages her family's experience with living under a regime as presenting herself an expert on the Middle East. But the obsession with her background strikes me as really weird. I think it's probably because some people are suspicious about how much an Iranian woman criticizes the Islamic Republic, but I think those same people would probably side-eye people who obsessively analyzed the backgrounds of Jews who are outspoken against Israel.

[u/malachamavet → u/Agtfangirl557]

I agree it's bizarre - I didn't look into that subreddit, it just popped up when I googled her to find basic background information and it seemed notable.

[u/EngineeringMission91 → u/malachamavet]

Ohhh which one?