Would a supporter of segregation be rewarded by being hired at a high profile university? How about someone who is fiercely anti-LGBT? Certainly not in uber-liberal New York City.
But when it comes to racism against Jews, well, that’s ok.
City University of New York has shamefully hired the radical extremist Marc Lamont Hill – a staunch opponent of Israel, a proud BDS supporter and an outspoken advocate against the so-called “occupation of Palestine,” - as a “presidential professor” for Urban Education at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Marc Lamont Hill has a longstanding history of Anti-Jewish comments.
-On June 7, 2016, Marc Lamont Hill tweeted: “Israel is very much, by definition, an apartheid state.” An avid supporter of Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS), he criticized New York State Governor Cuomo’s initiative to stop illegal American boycotts of Israel, and ingenuously defends the movement insisting it is not seeking Israel’s destruction.
-Hill, quite active on social media, says that “Blaming the Palestinian Authority for violence in the region is dishonest and unproductive,” ignoring thousands of innocent terror victims murdered under PA aegis whose famiiies it supports. and 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 which would lead to the demographic destruction of the State of Israel and which is unacceptable in every other part of the world.
-Hill believes there is no religious component to the issue of Palestine. In a remarkable denial of accepted facts, he denies radical Islamists or religion at all is an issue between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
-During a CNN appearance on August 4, 2014, Lamont-Hill complained that Israel’s lifesaving defensive Iron Dome weapon ‘Takes Away Hamas’s Military Leverage’ Over Israel.
He said, “But what the Iron Dome does is it also takes away all of Hamas’s military leverage which is very different than say, 10 years ago or 15 years ago in other wars like Lebanon, etc. As a result, it not only serves a defensive purpose but de facto serves an offensive purpose. It allows Israel to essentially assault and siege Gaza without any retribution or response on the other side. So again, to some extent, they are not just funding defense, they are funding an offensive war and ultimately an occupation. That for me is the problem.”
Hill appears to object to Iron Dome because it “serves an offensive purpose” by allowing Israel to stop Hamas – which he does not consider a terrorist group – from killing Israeli citizens in “retribution."(Note to Mr. Hill: There is no moral equivalent between Israel and Hamas).
-Hill has accused Israel of denying “citizenship rights and due process to Palestinian Arabs 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.” The phrase “from the river to the sea” is a phrase used by those who believe Israel should be eliminated.
Terrible. Anti-Semitic.
Only a few months ago, Hill praised Palestinian terrorist Fatima Bernawi who had 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.”
Hill has said the Palestinian issue determines how he votes – and he voted for Cynthia McKinney for President, a radical who promotes conspiracy theories, including that ISIS works for Israel.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Hill’s choice for President "..has a history of using anti-Israel rhetoric, including accusing the pro-Israel lobby of sabotaging her political career and alleging that Israel of committing genocide, apartheid and war crimes.” In 2009, she “accused Israel of committing genocide”, has met with leaders of Hamas, and has criticized Israel for its military operation against Hamas. She has "...condemned the U.S. for supporting “Israel’s war machine.”
It is not just on Middle East issues that Hill holds radical viewpoints. In 2009, Hill agreed with the America-hating professorWard Churchill, who was fired from the University of Colorado at Boulder for an essay he wrote titled “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” which said that the 9/11 World Trade Center victims deserved what they got.
Churchill’s essay asserted that the victims who died in the World Trade Center were akin to “little Eichmanns” [a reference to Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”] who, as a consequence of their status as faceless cogs in America’s allegedly destructive capitalist economy, had essentially brought the terrorist attacks upon themselves.
Marc Lamont Hill commented on Ward Churchill’s termination:
“This is a really sad day for American academic life and American public life. Ward Churchill should not have been fired. This has been about free speech from the beginning.... A witch hunt began the moment that he made those comments about the 9/11 victims. And regardless of what we think about his comments, he has the right to make them. In fact, he has the responsibility to make them as an academic if he believes them to be true ... and if he can empirically substantiate them, and I think he’s done that.... When you look at his ‘Little Eichmann’ comment, he’s explained this. He was referring to Hannah Arendt, on of the great theorists of our time, in which he was saying that often times, the big bad person that you think is this crazy killer is actually an ordinary technocrat, someone in a building who pushes buttons, who does things without any sort of sensibility about how bad they are.
“And he is saying that many times the people who were in that building may have been advancing an American global financial empire without any thinking about it. And I don’t necessarily agree that we should be indifferent to their suffering. I happen to be a little more sympathetic to the victims and their families than Ward Churchill is, but he certainly had a valid point...”
When Bill O’Reilly subsequently took issue with what he called Churchill’s “Little Nazis"comment, Hill replied: “He [Churchill] didn’t say Little Nazis ... Not Little Nazis, Little Eichmanns.... That’s different than calling them Nazis. He added context and texture to it.”
In this age of political correctness, if someone would dare to take such radical public positions against the LGBTQ community or individuals within it, or be openly hostile to the Latino community, that person would never be hired by CUNY.
Shame on CUNY – which only months ago allowed CUNY Law School graduate Fatima Mohammed to make a terribly Anti-Israel commencement speech where she accused Israel of encouraging “lynch mobs.”
Marc Lamont Hill may have the right to his beliefs in a democratic country – yet these radical, extremist positions don’t belong at CUNY..
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SAFECUNY released a response to the hiring, excerpted below:
“We learned today that CUNY has hired renowned antisemite, Marc Lamont Hill.
“This is what systemic antisemitism means. This is what it looks like when a university fully commits to expunging its Jews --students, staff, and faculty alike. CUNY itself has already proudly described Hill, now at its Graduate Center Antisemitism Incubator as a “radical” whose research addresses --surprise!-- “Settler-Colonialism” and “Palestine.”
“This, from a university whose chief of diversity is a BDS activist and a former director of CAIR MN, is currently investigating four Zionist Jews for filing antisemitism complaints, lists the antisemitic Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism on its main discrimination page, and that has expunged all Jews from its senior leadership in a city that is 20% Jewish....
"... It is time for the Chancellor to go-- there is absolutely no question about that. And we appeal to CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Bill Thompson to please, finally, make that happen. It has certainly long since been time for Diversity Chief former CAIR director and BDSer Saly Abd Alla to go...
"...The situation could not be more serious, and we do not currently have serious leaders.”