Al Jazeera host and CUNY professor Marc Lamont Hill blasted the media for “framing” Hamas as terrorists as a way to delegitimize the group instead of calling it a “government organization” despite its control of Gaza.
Last week, Hill appeared on Briahna Joy Gray’s “Bad Faith” podcast after she hosted a Hamas spokesperson on her Al Jazeera English (AJE) program “UpFront.”
Hill suggested Hamas was willing to talk to other news organizations but the media was reluctant to do so because of the group’s terrorist status.
“I’m not convinced that they don’t want to talk to these other networks. It seems to me that the rest of the corporate media has decided that they don’t want to talk to them, and part of the reason is because they’ve decided to frame them as a terrorist network,” Hill said.
“And when you have Netanyahu and others saying that they’re no different than… ISIS, then it becomes — you’re not going to do an exclusive with ISIS on CNN so they’re not going to do it with Hamas,” Hill continued. “And it’s part of a broader project, I think, of framing Hamas not as a governmental organization – even if you think that what happened on October 7 was an act of terrorism – by framing them as a terrorist organization rather than a government, on the contrary. from democratically elected governments and/or political parties, it makes it easier to avoid political and diplomatic solutions.”
Hill repeatedly insisted he was not a supporter of Hamas but said he understood “what happens when you take people’s political choices, and you alienate them.”
Al Jazeera host Marc Lamont Hill slammed the media for “framing” Hamas as a terrorist group.AP Photo
Oct. 7 was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed at least 1,400 soldiers and civilians including women, children and the elderly.
Hundreds more were kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
Most news organizations in America have referred to Hamas as a terrorist organization, but other foreign media, such as the BBC, initially refused to do so.
BBC world affairs editor John Simpson explained to the audience, “Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about clothes they morally disapprove of. It’s not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys… We don’t take sides. We don’t use loaded words like ‘evil’ or ‘coward’. We are not talking about ‘terrorists’.”
Following the overwhelming backlash, the British broadcaster was forced to come clean and acknowledge Hamas as a terrorist organization instead of referring to the group as “militants.”
First responders at home hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on November 2, 2023. Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images
Hill was fired from CNN in 2018 when he called for “free Palestine from river to sea,” a phrase widely seen as a declaration of Israel’s elimination, during a speech at the United Nations. He addressed the controversy on a podcast with Gray.
“My critics will argue that I am repeating a specific cry from Hamas, which, when they were founded in 1987, said, ‘We do not support a two-state solution.’ Really? ‘We are a liberation organization, and we want all of historic Palestine to be returned to the Palestinian people,’ which, frankly, the default position of the Arab world between 1948 and 1967, right, was that all of historic Palestine was to be returned to the Arabs,” Hill told Gray.
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“When Hamas says… ‘from the river to the sea,’ for them, the argument is that if they call for all the land to return then that means all the Jews are pushed into the sea, that all the Jews must be killed for this to happen. That’s their analysis of Hamas. Now … when I say, ‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea,’ I am not echoing the Hamas charter. When you go to any ‘Free Palestine’ rally, when you go to a Palestinian rights rally, you will hear ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ … this is not a call to kill Jews. This is a call for Palestine and Palestinians to have freedom, security, dignity and self-determination in all the historical areas of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” he claimed.
Protesters in Tel Aviv called on Hamas to release the Israeli hostages taken during the October 7 terrorist attack. AP Photo/Oded Balilty
“Why is it important to say the whole region? Well, because those in the West Bank need the occupation to end. Those in Gaza need an effective occupation to end. They need the siege to end too,” Hill said.
“So, ‘from the river to the sea’ is a call for justice in all the historic Palestinian territories. It’s not a Hamas call,” Hill continued. “It’s like if you say ‘Black Power,’ and somebody says, ‘Well, I can put out a new Black Panther Party statement, you know, kill White people’… and they say ‘Black Power,’ and so Briahna is echoes the call of the new Black Panther Party.’”
“Most of the people I know who are calling for ‘river to sea’ are calling, not the enforcement of the Hamas charter… I have never met anyone who thinks so,” he added.
A man mourns at the funeral for Israeli combat medic Shay Arvas, who was killed in the Gaza Strip.REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Back in 2018 when he first faced backlash, Hill wrote, “In my speech, I talked about the need to return to the pre-1967 borders, to give full rights to Israeli Palestinians, and to allow the right of return. No part of this is a call to destroy Israel. It doesn’t make sense on his face.”
Neither Hill nor Al Jazeera English immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Several members of the legacy media previously worked at Al Jazeera, the Qatari-run news organization known for its hostile coverage of Israel.
Among them are MSNBC weekend hosts Ali Velshi, Ayman Mohyeldin and Mehdi Hasan, all three of whom made headlines for their anti-Israel stance during the network’s coverage after the October 7 terrorist attacks.
Notably, Hasan previously hosted “UpFront” before Hill, who took over the AJE program in 2021.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
