Marc Lamont Hill is a fan of the Sixers, Farrakhan and killing Jews. He also holds the answer to the question, ‘How many times can you justify the murder of Jews before CNN fires you?’
Hill had spent at least four years justifying and defending the murder of Jews before CNN finally parted ways with its former commentator. And it did so without ever condemning his hateful remarks.
In 2014, Hill had claimed on CNN that the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah, one of them an American citizen, wasn’t “terrorism”, but “resistance”.
And CNN let it pass.
Earlier this year, Hill had insisted that “occupied people have a legal and moral right to defend themselves” and that the idea that Israel has a “right to exist” is “propaganda”. In May of last year, he had argued that Trump’s “call for Palestine to ‘reject hatred and terrorism’ is offensive.”
A month before a Pittsburgh synagogue was shot up by a violent bigot; Hill again justified the murder of Jews by violent bigots.
“We have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways,” he complained.
Anyone who might have been hoping that the murder of eleven Jews by a killer who also thought he was engaging in “resistance”, not “terrorism” would have touched Hill’s heart was sadly mistaken.
A month after the Pittsburgh massacre, Marc Lamont Hill addressed a UN event in support of the terror colonialists occupying parts of Israel, endorsed BDS, called for the destruction of Israel and justified the murder of Jews.
“We must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend themselves. We must prioritize peace, but we must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but cannot endorse narrow politics that shames Palestinians for resisting,” Hill argued.
It was an ideological defense of the murder of Jews by a CNN commentator, a Temple University prof and a BET and VH1 host only a short time after everyone had briefly agreed that anti-Semitism was bad.
And after four years of defending the murder of Jews, it proved to be too much even for CNN.
“Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN,” the news network curtly announced. It didn’t condemn his hatred. It didn’t denounce his defense of the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
It wasn’t news to CNN that Hill believed that Israel should be destroyed or that terrorism against Jews is acceptable. Long before his call for, “Palestine from the river to the sea”, erasing the existence of Israel and the only independent political self-determination option of the Jewish people, he had made similar remarks advocating some form of a ‘one-state solution’ that would replace Israel with a Muslim state.
And it certainly wasn’t news that he had defended terrorist violence against Jews. He’d done it on CNN.
CNN was forced to let Hill go because of all the negative attention, but the media quickly circled its wagons around him with numerous stories, most prominently in the Washington Post, misrepresenting his firing as due to “pro-Palestinian” remarks or “criticism of Israel” rather than the murder of Jews.
That’s the same paper that recently provided a forum for the Houthi terrorists in Yemen whose motto is, “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam”.
If Hill can’t appear on CNN, perhaps the Washington Post will find some space for him.
And that shows that the scale of the problem is much bigger than Hill or CNN.
CNN covered for Hill as long as it could. When it no longer could, the Washington Post and other media outlets began covering for him. Like Steven Salaita whose defense of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence made him a media hero, the media protects Hill because it agrees with him.
The media accused President Trump of “dog whistles”. This isn’t a dog whistle. It’s a deafening shriek.
Hill defended the murder of Israeli men, women and children in their homes, in cars and buses, in restaurants and synagogues, by the adherents of a violently anti-Semitic ideology convinced that Jews are the descendants of “apes and pigs” (Koran 5:60) who must die because the Day of Judgement “will not come unless the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’” (Sahih Muslim)
When we talk about Islamic terrorism in Israel, this is what we are truly talking about. And the media would rather put on Hill to defend anti-Semitic terrorism than anyone who will condemn it as evil.
There is no better evidence of how hollow the post-Pittsburgh outrage was.
Temple University, where Hill works as a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, distanced itself from his remarks, but failed to condemn them or end its relationship with him. And there is no sign that Verizon’s Huffington Post, where some of his pro-terrorist remarks were printed, will end its relationship with him. And also, no comment from VH1 and BET about his current standing.
Even after a national dialogue about anti-Semitism, no one will condemn the whitewashing of the racist murder of Jews in the language of civil rights, framing the kidnappings, stabbings, shootings, bombings, beheadings as an alternative tactic whose racist perpetrators must not be shamed.
Hill didn’t just defend the murder of Jews as an abstract proposition, but stood by specific terrorists, like Rasmea Odeh, who had been convicted in the bombing deaths of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, two Jewish college students at Hebrew University who were shopping for groceries in a supermarket before the Sabbath. Edward’s brother lives in Texas and attended Odeh’s trial.
Marc Lamont Hill never mentioned Edward and Leon’s names, just as he never mentioned the names of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah when he was defending their kidnapping and murder on CNN. Before justifying the murder of Jews, Hill dehumanizes them by refusing to say their names and acknowledge their humanity. He refuses to hear the scream of Edward’s mother, Nadine, when she learned her son had been murdered. He doesn’t want to hear Naftali’s father describe writing the eulogy for his 16-year-old son before he even knew whether he would be found dead or alive.
The case of Marc Lamont Hill shows not only how the media tolerates even the ugliest forms of anti-Semitism, but how posturing about Trump diverts the Left from addressing its own anti-Semitism.
After the Pittsburgh massacre, Hill claimed that, “Trump’s political machine often traffics in anti-Semitism.”
That claim came from the same man who had posted how “blessed” it was to “spend the last day with Minister Louis Farrakhan.” Then he claimed that the racist leader who had praised Hitler, compared Jews to termites and called Judaism a “gutter religion” was not anti-Semitic because, “I do not believe, based on my understanding and my reading of anti-Semitism, that he is an anti-Semite.”
Hill, like so many on the Left, insisted on diverting every discussion about anti-Semitism by turning right to avoid a reckoning with his own hatred. He claimed that he was opposed to Israel, rather than Jews, but his defense of Farrakhan makes it clear that even that isn’t true. But many Jews on the Left continue allowing Hill, Sarsour and so many others who use that tactic to continue getting away with it.
And that’s why Marc Lamont Hill will be back.
There’s little doubt that he will be brought on board some other media outlet. And how many years of justifying the murder of Jews and posing with Farrakhan will it take this time before he’s fired?