Nov. 29, 4 PM Update:
CNN has been under fire, including by CAMERA, for its continued collaboration with someone who increasingly expresses bigotry and promotes violence. It has now been reported that CNN has severed its ties with Lamont Hill.
It is no secret that Marc Lamont Hill is an extremist who hates Israel, promotes anti-Israeli violence and terrorism, and advocates violent "resistance" to, and the elimination of, the Jewish state. Yet he continues to be listed as a political commentator on CNN and a professor at Temple University, promoting himself as a journalist, author, social justice activist, and bombastically proclaiming himself “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.”
The fact that he is still accepted as a mainstream “scholar” and “journalist” while using his activist status as a platform to incite anti-Israeli violence and the end of the Jewish state is particularly disturbing. How many times does he have to display his true colors before CNN finally decides that enough is enough?
How many times must his defense of the kidnapping and murders of Israeli children by a terrorist group, his advocacy on behalf of convicted Palestinian terrorists, his opposition to Israel’s use of an air defense system to protect its civilians from deadly rockets, his close association with noted anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, and his relentless, propagandistic lies about Israel be exposed? How many times must he repeat his opposition to peaceful resistance and how many times must he advocate violence until media outlets distance themselves from him? (See previous articles.)
At a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference two months ago, Lamont Hill promoted anti-Israel violence, declaring "we have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we're undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways."
He reiterated that sentiment at a meeting yesterday of the UN’s Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. He declared, “Our solidarity must be more than a noun; our solidarity must become a verb,” as he pushed for the BDS campaign against Israel and promoted anti-Israel violence. He explained that solidarity means recognizing the right of Palestinians to “self-defense” and compared violent Palestinian attacks on Israelis to resistance by American blacks to slavery and Jim Crow laws. He said:
Contrary to western mythology, black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Ghandi and nonviolence .… Rather, slave revolts and self-defense and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom. If we are to operate in true solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility.
He ended by echoing Hamas and those who aim to destroy Israel as he called for the elimination of the Jewish state to create a "Palestine from the river to the sea."
Does CNN really want to continue its association with such a radical activist and hater?
UPDATE: The answer is evidently, no.