Marc Lamont Hill: I had tons of support. When it comes to anti-Israel faculty, he's not wrong.
Former CNN commentator and current Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill got fired from CNN after calling for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” But he insists his comment received vast support, including from academia.
“If I had a dollar for every progressive member of Congress, for every progressive faculty member, for every progressive cable news or otherwise TV commentator who sent me a private message saying, ‘I agree with you,’” Hill told The Intercept in a conversation published Thursday, “I’d have so much money.”
CNN fired Hill in November after the professor advocated for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
“The final words of my speech became a dangerous and harmful distraction from my political analysis,” Hill later said in a column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I did no favors to Israelis or Palestinians. For this too, I am deeply sorry.”
“Free Palestine from the river to the sea” is a slogan that has been used by terrorists from groups such as Hamas.
One look at past Campus Reform coverage suggests that Hill isn’t wrong about academic anti-Israel bias.
In October, the University of Michigan hosted a town hall that had only anti-Israel speakers, two days after a massacre at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh. A professor and TA at the school also refused to write recommendations for students looking to study abroad, on the basis that they wanted to study in Israel.
Campus Reform reported in February 2018 that a Columbia professor declared that the Women’s March had become “deeply infiltrated” by “Zionists,” whom he called “master thieves.”
[RELATED: Prof: Zionist ‘master thieves’ have ‘infiltrated’ Women’s March]
In April 2018, more than 50 New York University groups pledged to boycott academic institutions and Israeli products such as Sabra Hummus and Hewlett Packard, pledged to boycott Israeli conferences, and demanded that NYU divest from Israeli companies.
Campus Reform reported in May 2018 that Dr. Melissa Landa, a Jewish professor who worked in the Education Department at the University of Maryland, said that she was fired for her pro-Israel and anti-BDS views, saying, “once my involvement with Israel became political, that is when things started to change.”
Following Hill’s comments in December, Temple University Board of Trustees chairman Patrick O’Connor said that he’d received multiple emails from “alums, professors, students, friends of Israel, politicians, young, old, Black, white,” concluding that Hill’s comments caused the university “immeasurable harm.”
“I’ll let you know at the end of the day [what the damage is] when people who used to give us significant amounts of money follow up on their promise never to give another dime,” O’Connor said, as Campus Reform reported at the time.
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