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CNN Commentator Fired After U.N. Speech Endorsing Anti-Israel Violence

Posted on | December 1, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

The usual suspects on the Left are upset that Professor Mark Lamont Hill lost his contract as a CNN commentator Thursday — he remains on the payroll of Temple University — but he said what he said:

CNN Contributor Marc Lamont Hill told the United Nations on Wednesday that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state, and defended the Palestinian use of violence against Israel.
Hill was speaking at the “U.N. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which provides an annual platform for extremist rhetoric against Israel. He was present to express his views as an “invited representative of civil society.” . . .
Hill referred to the founding of Israel in May 1948 as “the great catastrophe,” borrowing the term “Nakba,” which is used by Palestinians. . . . Hill continued with various other accusations against Israel, adding that he had refused to drink “Israeli water” on a flight from “Palestine” to New York. . . .

[Quoting Hill’s speech:] Solidarity from the international community demands that we embrace boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as a critical means by which to hold Israel accountable for its treatment of Palestinian people. . . .
Black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Gandhi 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. We must allow—if we are to operate in true solidarity with Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility. If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace. But we must not romanticize or fetishize it. . . .
So as we stand here on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the tragic commemoration of the Nakba, we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Israel either has the right to exist, or it doesn’t, and Marc Lamont Hill quite clearly denies Israel’s right to exist. It would ill behoove Hill to claim his remarks were “taken out of context,” because we have the full transcript of his speech, and it does not exonerate him.

Many conservatives have been purged or marginalized for saying things less obviously hateful than what Hill said, and his known association with Louis Farrakhan adds weight to the charge of anti-Semitism.

If you’re going to demand that we “recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself,” shouldn’t this principle extend beyond Israel? And if 70 years is not enough time to ratify Israel’s territorial sovereignty, how long will it take? What other historic conquests will you delegitimize? What other “occupied people” will you encourage to use violence to resist their conquerors? What about the people of Texas, a formerly independent republic? What about British rule in Northern Ireland? Would Mark Lamont Hill endorse a secessionist uprising in Texas or a renewal of anti-British terrorism by the IRA?

This is where everyone might benefit from reading Thomas Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures: An International History, which makes the point that being an “occupied people” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some conquests are objectively better than others. We might observe that the Germans were an “occupied people” after losing World War II, but the Allied occupation of Germany was better than the previous Nazi occupation of Poland. The fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union instituted a new totalitarian occupation of Eastern Europe after Hitler’s defeat is arguably the source of the confusion in Marc Lamont Hill’s mind. Why? Because Soviet propaganda justified the Iron Curtain and the Cold War by claiming America under Harry Truman was a “fascist” power, and this anti-American ideology took root on the Left. During the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War, every U.S. ally was targeted for such smears by Soviet propaganda, which was parroted by the Left in America and other Western countries. This is how and why Palestinian nationalism became a cause célèbre on the Left in the late 1960s, becauses the Soviets were always eager to exploit any Third World conflict for their own advantage, and therefore furnished weapons to Israel’s enemies.

The Left’s hatred of Israel is a legacy of this Soviet propaganda, and you might notice that the British stopped having problems with IRA terrorism not long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Coincidence? No, it is a fact that the KGB smuggled weapons to the IRA, in the same way that they smuggled weapons to Palestinian terrorists in Israel.

More than 25 years after the Soviet Union ended up in “the ash heap of history,” just as Ronald Reagan had predicted, the poisonous seeds of Soviet propaganda continue to produce tainted fruit. In fact, this decaying fruit becomes more toxic with each passing year because of the “intersectionality” of identity politics promoted on our university campuses by left-wing academics like Professor Hill. Consider this passage from his speech Wednesday at the United Nations:

What I’m challenging us to do in the spirit of solidarity is not to embrace optimism but to embrace radical hope. Radical hope is a belief that despite the odds, despite the considerable measures against justice and peace, despite the legacy of hatred and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and homophobia, despite these systems of power that have normalized settler colonialism, despite these structures, we can still win. We can still prevail.
One motivation for my hope in the liberation and ultimate self-determination of the Palestinian people comes in August of 2014. Black Americans were in Ferguson, Missouri in the Midwest of the United States protesting the death of a young man named Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American male who had been killed by a law enforcement agent. And as we protested, I saw two things that provided hope for the Palestinian struggle. One was that for the first time in my entire life of activism I saw a sea of Palestinian people. I saw a sea or Palestinian flags in the crowd saying that we must form a solidarity project. We must struggle together in order to resist because state violence in the United States and state violence in Brazil and state violence is Syria and state violence in Egypt and state violence in South Africa, and state violence in Palestine are all of the same sort. And we finally understood that we must work together and not turn on each other, but instead turn to each other.
And later that night when the police began to tear gas us, Mariam Barghouti tweeted us from Ramallah. She, along with other Palestinian youth activists, told us that they tear gas that we were experiencing was only temporary. They gave us tips for how to wash our eyes out. They told us how to make gas masks out of t-shirts. They gave us permission to think and dream beyond our local conditions by giving us a transnational or a global solidarity project.

If “global solidarity” were to yield “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” as Professor Hill so ardently hopes, are we to suppose that this “liberated” Palestine would be free from “patriarchy and homophobia”? Perhaps the women and girls raped by ISIS and the homosexuals persecuted in Iran would disagree with Professor Hill’s “radical hope.”

Furthermore, what are we to conclude from Professor Hill’s assertion that the Ferguson riots were analogous to the Palestinian “struggle”? Couldn’t this be interpreted as an endorsement of anti-white terrorism in the United States? And if arresting a robbery suspect — which is what Michael Brown was — is intolerable “state violence,” then isn’t Professor Hill delegitimizing all law enforcement? Officer Darren Wilson was exonerated after evidence showed that Brown was shot after attempting to take the officer’s gun while resisting arrest. The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative promoted by the #BlackLivesMatter movement was a lie — a bogus propaganda claim — and yet here we are, more than four years later, with Professor Hill preaching that lie at the United Nations!

CNN, which devoted many hours of coverage to promoting #BlackLivesMatter propaganda in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, has cut loose Professor Hill, but it has not repudiated its allegiance to the Left, and so we can expect still more poisoned fruit from that toxic tree.

UPDATE: Ace is on the warpath against Dan McLaughlin and other “conservatives” who defend CNN because of their totally-not-gay crushes on Jake Tapper.



 

Category: CNN, Israel, Racism

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One Response to “CNN Commentator Fired After U.N. Speech Endorsing Anti-Israel Violence”

  1. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    December 2nd, 2018 @ 10:27 am

    […] The Other McCain covers the firing of anti-Jew Marc Lamont Hill […]