Marc Lamont Hill will keep his job as professor at Temple University despite his anti-Israel comments at the U.N., the institution said on Wednesday.
By Joseph Wolkin, World Israel News
Former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill will keep his day job as a professor at Temple University, the institution said on Wednesday.
Hill was fired from his role at CNN after he gave a U.N. speech on November 28, in which he called for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a euphemism among Arab enemies of Israel for its destruction.
The board of trustees at Temple University, however, opted to keep Hill, who is a professor of media studies and urban education. The board said it disagreed with Hill’s comments, expressing “disappointment, displeasure and disagreement.”
“We recognize that Professor Hill’s comments are his own, that his speech as a private individual is entitled to the same constitutional protection of any other citizen,” the statement said. “He has, through subsequent statements, expressly rejected anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence.”
“In giving this speech outside of his role as a teacher and researcher at Temple, Professor Hill was not speaking on behalf of or representing the University,” the statement said.
Hill gave his speech at the opening meeting of the U.N.’s annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Hill echoed other Palestinian propaganda points, referring to the Gaza Strip as “the world’s largest open-air prison.”
In his most extreme remarks, Hill endorsed violent means for the Palestinians to achieve their goals. “We must promote non-violence at every opportunity, but cannot endorse narrow politics that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in ethnic cleansing,” he said.
Hill wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer after the incident in which he denied that his comments promoted anti-Semitic rhetoric, calling for a “single, bi-national democratic state that encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza,”
The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which is observed annually on November 29, was established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1977.