Wiesenthal Center Applauds CNN for Firing Marc Lamont Hill

“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, Hillaccused 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 theface 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 tothe 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 andGaza – 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 theriver 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 theUN!”

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the UnitedStates. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).