Reports indicate that a supporter of BDS – a boycott of Israel – a self-proclaimed radical who has supported numerous anti-American initiatives has been named the host of a new late nite talk show on VH1. Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN commentator will launch VH1 Live which will air weekly on the Viacom-owned cable network on Sunday, July 17 at 10 PM.
Would a supporter of segregation be rewarded with a talk show? How about someone who is fiercely anti-LGBT? It seems that racism is only ok if it is directed at Israel. Hill is a staunch opponent of Israel, a proud BDS supporter – and an outspoken advocate against the so-called “occupation of Palestine.”
Witness, 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 recently criticized New York State Governor Cuomo’s initiative to stop illegal American boycotts of Israel, and simplistically 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,” noting 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.
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 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 & Hamas).
Hill is so passionate about this issue that he has said the Palestinian issue determines how he votes – and last election 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 professor Ward 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 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.”
Hill defended President Obama’s former green jobs czar Van Jones who was forced to resign in September 2009, amid controversy over his self-proclaimed communist activism, saying:
“[I]t’s so disappointing that the Obama administration didn’t fight for Van Jones. They put him up there. They hired the guy. And then throw him under the bus when it’s politically expedient. It’s very disappointing.”
In this age of political correctness, if one would take such radical public positions against the LGBTQ community or individuals within it, or be openly hostile to the Latino community, that person would hardly be considered for his own talk show on VH1, a source of information and entertainment for the younger generations. Marc Lamont Hill has the right to his beliefs – yet these radical, extremist positions which are so at odds with the majority of Americans of all political persuasions should not be rewarded with a talk show on VH1.