Is CNN now just OK with genocidal rhetoric aimed at Jews?

Hill is of course free to express his noxious opinions, as he did at the United Nations on Wednesday. But there is an important distinction between free speech and a private company providing a forum for somebody to express their views. In the past, CNN has decided that certain comments have crossed the line (even when made off-air), and such, it fired Jeffrey Lord, Kathy Griffin, and Reza Aslan. So clearly, the news organization views some comments as beyond the pale. Does Hill’s eliminationist rhetoric make the cut? If not, then why?

For those who are unfamiliar, on Wednesday, at a U.N. event commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Hill ended his speech by declaring that “justice requires” a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

The phrase, “from the river to the sea,” means expanding a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and it is a term that the terrorist group Hamas has used as a rallying cry for decades. Establishing a Palestinian state from the river to the sea would require the destruction of Israel, which is located in between those two bodies of water and is home to 44 percent of the world’s Jews.

Hill’s attempts to explain his words on Twitter only make things worse.

He wrote, “I believe in a single secular democratic state for everyone. This is the only way that historic Palestine will be free.” There is no such place as “historic Palestine” with defined borders, and again, creating one where he described would require wiping Israel off of the map. It would reject the concept of a Jewish homeland, and put Jewish security in the hands of enemies who have spent decades trying to annihilate them. As for democracy, that must be a joke, given that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is about to enter the 15th year of his four-year term, and he has alternatively denied the Holocaust or argued that the Jews brought it on themselves.

Hill also dismissed the idea that his invocation of the phrase “river to the sea” had anything to do with Hamas. He wrote, “‘River to the sea’ is a phrase that precedes Hamas by more than 50 years. It also has a variety of meanings. In my remarks, which you clearly didn’t hear, I was talking about full citizenship rights IN Israel and a redrawing of the pre-1967 borders.”

Hamas was founded in 1987, and 50 years earlier in 1937, Israel had not yet been established. Arabs rejected a two-state solution at the time, because they wouldn’t accept any Jewish presence in the region, and the leader of the Palestinians allied with Adolf Hitler. So I’m not sure how it helps Hill’s case. Also, his reference to the 1967 borders and rights within Israel makes no sense, given that Israel wouldn’t exist in the “single” state he endorsed extending through all of “historic Palestine.”

Currently, CNN’s website states, “Marc Lamont Hill is a CNN political commentator and one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.”

If CNN decides to keep Hill on, they at least owe their viewers a detailed explanation as to why they believe genocidal rhetoric against Jews is within the boundaries of legitimate debate and why it’s more acceptable than statements that have had led to the dismissals of other CNN personalities.