Marc Lamont Hill should be reinstated without delay

African-American college professor and activist Dr Marc Lamont Hill has been fired from his side-gig at CNN for the “crime” of speaking out in solidarity with Palestine. Last month, Hill spoke at the UN on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. He gave a brilliantly eloquent and moving speech in which he called for solidarity with Palestinians to go beyond sloganeering towards active participation in the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Solidarity (BDS) movement.

Drawing historical parallels between the Palestinian liberation struggle and Black liberation struggles, Hill even backed the right of both to use arms in self-defence in pursuit of their freedom.

“Contrary to Western mythology,” he explained, “Black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Gandhi and nonviolence. Rather, slave revolts and self-defence and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr [Martin Luther] King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom. We must allow – if we are to operate in true solidarity with Palestinian people – we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility.”

Although in reality this is simple common sense, some would probably see it as the most radical part of the speech. What actually happened, though, was that there was a media scrum, led by pro-Israel Zionist fanatics, which focused on another particular part of Hill’s speech.

READ: The pro-Israel lobby’s weaponisation of anti-Semitism takes a hit in the US 

The obsession was with his conclusion, in which he called for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” This was then – deliberately, and in utter bad faith — distorted and wrongly portrayed as a “call for genocide” or for “the destruction of Israel”. Zionism and Zionists are so opposed to freedom for Palestinians that if there is to be full freedom for everyone living in the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea it amounts to “destruction” in their eyes.

This is actually a common propaganda trope used by Zionist fanatics to smear the Palestinian liberation struggle. Another such propaganda smear is the lie that Palestinians want to “drive the Jews into the sea” – when in reality it was Palestinians who were literally driven into the sea during the 1948 Nakba, as I explained in another column earlier this month. It is also the land of Palestine which is being destroyed on a daily basis by Israel’s creeping colonisation.

Hill’s call for freedom would, if implemented, lead to an end to the Zionist system of apartheid and racism in all of historic Palestine. That is a threat to Israel’s system of injustice, so its supporters could not allow that to stand on such a large and influential platform as CNN, even if, as Hill explains in the radio interview above, the TV news channel never permitted him to speak on Palestine, despite his expertise on the issue.

He was thus hounded out of his job as a political contributor on CNN, which dropped him while claiming that his UN speech was not in line with the channel’s “values”. Its executives, however, never specified which part of the speech they had a problem with.

Even more disgracefully, there was talk at his main employer, Temple University in Philadelphia, of removing him from the prestigious Steve Charles Chair that he holds, despite the fact that he’s a tenured professor and thus cannot be fired. “I’m not happy,” said Temple’s chair of trustees Patrick O’Connor. “The board’s not happy. The administration’s not happy. People wanted to fire him right away… We’re going to look at what remedies we have.”

READ: The world condemns Israel 

The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech groups defended Hill, pointing out that firing him would be a massive violation of his constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech. The First Amendment means that Temple University would be in a lot of legal hot water if it sacked or took other measures against him. As the mainstream media scandal has blown over, however, such talk seems to have abated, but the mere fact that they would even entertain the idea of firing a tenured professor shows what an incendiary issue Palestine still is.

Hill’s support for Palestinian rights as a prominent Black civil rights activist in the US today may to some seem like a new development. Indeed, the Israeli government is increasingly worried about an increase in mutual solidarity between the Black Lives Matter movement and the Palestinian liberation struggle, as revealed in The Lobby USA, the censored but leaked undercover Al Jazeera documentary.

The reality, though, is that ties between the movement for Black liberation in the USA and the Palestine liberation struggle are as old as both movements; Hill discusses this in the radio interview linked above. Malcolm X himself visited Palestine in solidarity, as did many Black Panther leaders. This principled and mutual solidarity continues to this day.

CNN should reinstate Marc Lamont Hill without delay. The channel’s act of political and racist censorship should not be allowed to stand.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.