News Busters

Stewart, Coates Compare Israel To Slave Traders

With only one week to go until the first anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart thought it would be a good idea to welcome far-left author Ta-Nehisi Coates to Monday’s taping of The Daily Show to promote his new book and compare the besieged nation to slave owners and traders.

Stewart set the table, “There’s a certain aspect of your career that has really tried to reconcile, not with things in the present, but their vestiges, the structures, racial politics, slavery, economic injustices, where it may not be the active virus, but it is these vestiges of it that still, you know, leach into the groundwater and make it toxic and polluted. This book felt a little different in that you were also going into the present. And bringing those lessons with you. And I thought that was a really moving part of the book.”