By Hugh Fitzgerald
Originally published at Frontpagemag.com
Marc Lamont Hill is the rabid anti-Israel academic who was fired as a commentator by CNN for his antisemitic views. He’s back, now as that appetizing thing, a full professor at CUNY, which is fitting, as CUNY has become the most anti-Israel university in the nation. He will be a “presidential professor” — the highest rung on CUNY’s professorial ladder. His field is “urban education,” which sounds gritty enough, but what exactly does it mean? I called CUNY to find out; no one could enlighten me.
The very busy Professor Hill has also been an anchor on Black News Tonight, which is a show on the Black Education Network. Hill describes himself as “an anthropologist of education.” No, I don’t have any idea what that means, either.
Here’s a bit more about Marc Lamont Hill, who is not just a profound scholar of urban education, and of hip-hop culture, but also an impressive “activist.” Hill is a founding board member of My5th, “a non-profit to discuss the laws that apply to your life.” His website says that “since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He has worked on campaigns to end the death penalty, abolish prisons, and release numerous political prisoners. Dr. Hill has also worked in solidarity with human rights movements around the world.” More on the resistible rise of Marc Lamont Hill can be found here: “CUNY Hires Extremist Anti-Israel Professor; Where Is the Outrage?,” Algemeiner, August 24, 2023:
…Hill has a longstanding history of anti-Israel animus. On June 7, 2016, he tweeted: “Israel is very much, by definition, an apartheid state.” An avid supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, he criticized New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s initiative to stop boycotts of Israel, and simplistically defends the movement by insisting that it does not seek Israel’s destruction. (Never mind that Hill once called for a state of Palestine from “the river to the sea,” as will be seen below).
When Hill called Israel “an apartheid state,” he failed to provide any examples of its “apartheid” policy. And in the seven years since, he has not produced a single example of that “apartheid.” For there are none. In Israel, Arabs sit on the Supreme Court, serve in the Knesset, go abroad as ambassadors. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs work in the same factories and offices, play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras, act in the same films, are treated in the same hospitals by both Jewish and Arab medical personnel, attend the same classes in the same universities. Jews and Arabs own restaurants and start high-tech businesses together. The only difference in their treatment is that Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military. I doubt that Marc Lamont Hill knows any of this, or if he did, that it would make any difference. About Israel’s wickedness, his mind is made up. Don’t confuse him with facts.
Hill, who is quite active on social media, says that “Blaming the Palestinian Authority for violence in the region is dishonest and unproductive,” claiming that Jerusalem is occupied. Hill advocates the “return” of third- and fourth-generation descendants of Palestinian Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and 1967 — a position that could lead to the demographic destruction of the State of Israel.
Hill is apparently unaware of the many claims made by the PA of being responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians, especially “settlers.” The PA doesn’t want to appear any less of a “resister” to Israeli oppression than Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Nor does Hill know about the PA”s “Pay-For-Slay” program, which provides generous lifetime payments to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists who were killed while carrying out their attacks. “Pay-For-Slay” both rewards past, and incentivizes future terrorism.
In a remarkable denial of accepted facts, he denies radical Islam or religion is a major issue between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
Now a Presidential Professor of Urban Education at CUNY, as well as a journalist with Al Jazeera, Marc Lamont Hill apparently has not noticed that the many imams at Al-Aqsa and at other mosques in the West Bank and Gaza who preach hatred of Jews rely solely on passages taken from the Qur’an and hadith. He hasn’t read the Hamas Charter, steeped as it is in the texts and teachings of Islam. He’s failed to hear the cries of “jihad” from members of Hamas, PIJ, and the PFLP at their rallies and marches. He is unaware of the antisemitic passages, based on Islamic teachings, found ithroughout the Palestinian schoolbooks. He in unaware that it is the Qur’an that teaches the Palestinians, as it does all Muslims, that they are the “best of peoples,” while non-Muslims, with the Jews of Israel given pride of place as the “worst enemies of Islam,” are “the most vile of created beings.” The religion of Islam is at the very heart of the endless Palestinian war — the jihad — waged against Israel.
During a CNN appearance on August 4, 2014, Hill complained that Israel’s defensive Iron Dome weapon, “Takes away Hamas’s military leverage” over Israel.
How intolerable it is, Marc Lamont insists, for Israeli scientists to have found a way to successfully defend Israeli civilians against rocket attacks by Hamas. The Iron Dome anti-missile defense system now manages to intercept 96% of the rockets launched against Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas from Gaza. How unfair of those diabolically clever Jews to figure out a way to take away Hamas’ “military leverage.”
Hill has accused Israel of denying “citizenship rights and due process to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish,” and expressed support for boycotting Israel in a speech noting that he thinks that there needs to be “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Israeli Arabs have exactly the same citizenship rights as Israeli Jews, and the same due process rights. Marc Lamont Hill ought to ask Muslim citizens of Israel if they think there is some legal right of which they are being deprived. But why should he? If the truth were known, it would only confuse people. They might even be better inclined toward Israel, and that would never do.
When Hill calls for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” that is another way of saying that Israel should be eliminated, and replaced by the Muslim Arab state of “Palestine.” The Jews will just have to go. Oh where? Back to wherever they came from. The Jews have no connection to Palestine. Palestine is obviously for the Palestinians. Professor Marc Lamont Hill is down with that.
Only a few months ago, Hill praised Palestinian terrorist Fatima Bernawi, who attempted to bomb the Zion Cinema in Jerusalem in 1967, saying, “She is a legend among Afro-Palestinians and a beloved daughter of Jerusalem. Much needs to be written about her life and struggle.”
Fatima Bernawi wanted to kill innocent Jews, but the bomb she brought to blow up the Zion Cinema failed; she was caught by Israeli police and spent ten years in jail. The rest of her life is one long unedifying tale. But there is one thing in her biography that might confuse Marc Lamont Hill. When Bernawi worked as a nurse for the Arab-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, her Saudi bosses would not allow her to give injections because of her black skin. Hill really ought to look into the whole matter of anti-black racism among Muslim Arabs — the historical record is extensive — as well as find out about the Arab slave trade in Africa, that claimed as victims 18 million black Africans, far more than were enslaved by the Europeans.
Hill has said the Palestinian issue determines how he votes, and has made it known he’s vote for anti-Israel candidates in the past.
How deep must Hill’s anti-Israeli animus be, to make him a one-issue voter. No, it’s not BLM or black civil rights, but the “Palestinian issue” that determines his vote. Why is he so obsessed with “Palestine”? Or is it really that he is obsessed with Jews, and the most acceptable way to channel one’s antisemitism nowadays is by undermining the Jewish state? He’s determined to do it.
Marc Lamont Hill, the self-described “anthropologist of education,” sometime Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions, an Al Jazeera journalist and now, to cap it all, a Presidential Professor of Urban Education at CUNY, is surely next in line to become, after Cornel West retires, the World’s Greatest Authority. Are you as delighted with that prospect as I am?
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