“CNN had to fire Hill. He morphed from social commentator to a propagandist for Palestinian terrorism and the end of the Jewish State. And he did it at the UN!” said Center official

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is applauding CNN for firing commentator Marc Lamont Hill for publicly embracing extremist views against Israel. On Wednesday, at a special meeting convened at the UN in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Hill accused Israel of “normalizing settler colonialism,” and said, “If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself” and while he said that nonviolence should be advocated, he added, “We cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.” More alarming was that Hill ended his speech by saying, “Justice requires a free Palestine from the river to the sea”—a phrase calling for the end to the State of Israel commonly used by Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Wiesenthal Center’s Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action, said, “This isn’t a dog whistle. It’s a screaming cry to take all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – every square inch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – and replace it with a Palestinian State,” adding, “If a State of Palestine occupied the entire area ‘from the river to the sea’ – an area that has been the historic homeland of the Jewish people for 3,500 years – a Jewish State of Israel by definition could not exist on the same land.”

Rabbi Cooper concluded by saying, “CNN had to fire Hill. He morphed from social commentator to a propagandist for Palestinian terrorism and the end of the Jewish State. And he did it at the UN!”

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