CNN announced that it was ending its association with commentator Marc Lamont Hill following a speech at the United Nations in which he called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a phrase often used by the terrorist group Hamas, the New York Post reported Thursday.
Hill had called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” in a prepared speech that he offered at the United Nations in commemoration of the organization’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Sharon Nazarian, the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) senior vice president for international affairs, responded in an e-mail to the Jewish Journal, “Those calling for ‘from the river to the sea’ are calling for an end to the State of Israel.”
Hill, meanwhile, has defended himself on Twitter for the use of the phrase, writing, “My reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone. It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza. The speech very clearly and specifically said those things.”
However, a document released last year by Hamas used virtually identical language.
The document first defined Palestine as extending “from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south.” Later the document states, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
While the document had been described as having softened Hamas’s rejection of Israel, experts who read it concluded that it showed no such moderation on the part of Hamas.
Hill also explicitly supported the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and implicitly supported terrorism saying that the Palestinians should not be “be shamed for resisting.”
The former CNN analyst has a history of troubling comments and attitudes towards Jews and Israel.
Last year, he described President Donald Trump’s demand that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas stop supporting terror as being “offensive & counterproductive.”
Hill’s speech at the UN comes a month after a picture of him with Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who has a history of making anti-Semitic comments, emerged. While Hill condemned Farrakhan’s recent comment comparing Jews to termites, he has also refused to call the preacher an anti-Semite.
[Photo: unwatch / YouTube ]