Fairly Unbalanced Contributor

With good reason, the Fox News Channel (FNC) led by Glenn Beck spent many hours exploring the far-left radical views of White House official Van Jones. The scrutiny resulted in Jones being forced out. But officials and hosts of the cable channel clearly failed to “vet” Marc Lamont Hill, who is being presented to the FNC viewing audience on a regular basis as just “a Columbia University professor” with expertise on a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues.

In fact, Hill, a self-described public intellectual, is an acknowledged expert on “hip-hop culture,” a category defined as including break-dancing, rapping, graffiti writing, slang, and other such activities.

Much less well-known is Hill’s record of involvement in “revolutionary” causes, including support for convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur, a member of the terrorist Black Liberation Army (BLA) now living as a fugitive from justice in Communist Cuba. David Horowitz’s revelation of Hill’s embrace of the terrorist apparently caught FNC officials by surprise.

But desperate to appear “fair and balanced,” the popular cable news channel has already given Hill the special status of “Fox News contributor,” making him one of the select few who are paid to appear regularly on several different FNC programs. Hill’s performances on FNC have been featured on the air for several months now. But Hill will not discuss how much he is being paid to pontificate on issues far beyond his area of expertise, such as Obama’s foreign policy on Iran.

On the other hand, Hill did reportedly give an interview to “Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner,” where “he talked honestly about the types of mindsets many of his colleagues like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have when it comes to dealing with the Left” and praised Bill O’Reilly for not accepting some of the “outlandish claims” about President Obama.

In the same way that Van Jones was exposed originally by New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon by using Internet search engines to look into his controversial background and writings, over the course of just a few days Accuracy in Media has been able to determine the following about Hill from public sources:

• He called the notorious anti-white, anti-Jewish Khallid Muhammad a “mentor, teacher, and revolutionary hero,” and believes that the black racist died not from a brain aneurysm but was assassinated. Muhammad was so extreme that he was ousted from the Nation of Islam because of his hatred of Jews.
• He gave a lecture on “The Importance of Ideological Training in the New Millenium (sic)” at the Polymathematic University’s “Political Education Program for the Poor Righteous Communist Party.”
• He declared on a “MySpace” page that the people he’d like to meet personally include Assata Shakur, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro, and Mumia Abu Jamal, another convicted cop-killer.
• He speaks on “The Importance of the Nation of Islam to Hip-Hop Culture” and says that he once belonged to something called the Ansaaru Allah Community, an Islamic sect with doctrines similar to the Nation of Islam that has been accused of being a religious cult.
• Hill’s “MySpace” page features a slide show of such figures as Assata Shakur, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ella Baker, who just happens to be the namesake of the Ella Baker Center, founded by Van Jones.
• The Marc Lamont Hill website includes a graphic and obscene “Sex With Timaree” segment that features advice from a “Sexpert” on how to enjoy the “Land o’ Anal” or anal sex.

Hill told me in an interview that while he supports Shakur (his Twitter page is plastered with police photos of the fugitive), he was not the author of an article under his by-line and on his website that hails her escape from prison and grant of political asylum in Cuba. However, the article concludes with the name of “Marc.”

There is no confusion about Hill’s speaking engagement at Polymathematic University (PU). He is so proud of it that he includes the appearance on his publicly available 9-page Curriculum Vitae.

But PU is not an ordinary “university.” PU describes itself as “an institution built on the solid foundation of the revolutionary program of the Five Jewels and Restrictive Laws and the ideology of Polymathematics. In this day and time of intense class contradictions between the world’s working classes of color and the white U.S. empire and their lackeys, the necessity for a revolutionary institution that focuses on the education and training of revolutionaries is extremely important. PU is a direct alternative to the bourgeois universities of the old world of decadent Capitalism, guiding the poor ghetto children of color into the new world of Righteous Communism (Peace.)”

PU, which is an institution of the “Poor Righteous Party of the Black Nation,” has 25 different teachings. They include:

• “That so called African people and their family (Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow) are the aboriginal people of the Planet Earth.
• “That so called African people and their family (Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow) are the fathers and mothers of civilization.
• “That so called African people and their family (Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow) are righteous by nature as shown by historical development.
• “That the broad masses of dark-skinned people of the world majority are one people, the Original people, who share a common origin, a common destiny and a common enemy wherever they are at in the world.”

An associated website is “the web blog of the Poor Righteous Party of the Black Nation” where “you can find news, reports, analysis, statements and updates relating to the polymathematic revolution happening in the world today led our Party (sic).” It features photos of such figures as Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, and Malcolm X.

Hill’s tribute to black racist Khallid Muhammad is featured on his web page in an article under his by-line that includes personal references. He writes, “Of course, many will remember Dr. Khallid for his anti-Jewish remarks at Kean College, his Congressional censure, his bitter departure from the Nation of Islam, or his contentious Million Youth March. I, however, will remember Dr. Khallid for what he truly was: mentor, teacher, and revolutionary hero.”

“I love you and miss you Dr. Khallid,” it concludes.

In the Kean College speech, Muhammad “referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers,’ called for the genocide of white people, and demeaned both Pope John Paul II and homosexuals,” according to one report.

Hill goes on to say, “I first met Dr. Khallid when I was a 16-year-old activist working in Philadelphia. Khabyr Haddas and Hiram Ashantee, two Philadelphia activists to whom I looked up, introduced me to Dr. Khallid when he spoke to a community group at the West Philadelphia YMCA.” Ashantee was a leader of the New Black Panther Party.

While Hill says that he and Muhammad had different views on some issues and went in “drastically different directions” in their lives, he nevertheless goes on to say, “The thing that I remember and treasure most about Khallid Muhammad was his profound love for Black people. Although the media attempts to portray him as a hate monger, Dr. Khallid exuded a palpable love for Black people that permeated every aspect of his being. In all honesty, I did not truly understand what it meant to love Black people before I met Khallid Muhammad. After meeting him, I couldn’t help but do anything else.”

Hill writes that, “Although I believe that his death was an assassination rather than an accident-as Dr. Khallid would say, ‘another story for another time’-Dr. Khallid’s legacy taught me that you can kill revolutionaries, but not revolutions. For that, I am eternally indebted and grateful.”

He doesn’t explain who or what was behind this alleged assassination attempt. Perhaps they were the same forces who convicted Shakur of the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.

Hill maintains that Shakur is innocent but refers in the controversial article on his website under his by-line to the positive role played by “the ancestors” in her escape. This is presumably a reference to members of the BLA who worked with the Weather Underground to free the terrorist. The term “ancestors” has been used on other occasions by Hill to refer to important black figures in history.

The term “ancestors” takes on added significance because it is also used extensively on a website devoted to Assata Shakur, where the United States is labeled the “United Snakes.” A poem on the site declares, “Rise up, O Afrikan Ancestors, and let our enemies be scattered! And give us the wisdom and the boldness to deal with our oppressors and those who would hinder the liberation and empowerment of our people.”

Polymathematics is also featured on the Assata Shakur website, where questions and answers on the subject are posted. Were all of the “ancestors”-“all original people-Black, Brown, Red and Yellow people”-Polymathematicians? The answer is, “YES! they did not call themselves that, just as there are Polymathematicians out there that don’t call themselves that. But the word Polymathematician is a label for a phenomena (sic) that is Universal and Eternal.”

There is no available public record of what Hill said when he delivered his PU lecture on “The Importance of Ideological Training in the New Millenium (sic),” but there is an account at www.peacecomrade.org of what members of the Poor Righteous Party of the Black Nation did when they “participated in an interaction program organized by the Black Student Union of West Chester University.”

According to the account, someone named “Comrade Ingiaye” discussed the use of the party “as a revolutionary project against our open enemies,” while “Proctor Styles” declared that Black Panther Huey Newton was “one of the greatest and most important people in the history of our people” and recommended Mao’s Little Red Book, also known as “Quotations from Chairman Mao TseTung,” for reading.

One of Mao’s most famous quotations is “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'”

In this context, an Internet slide show associated with someone or something called “Polymathematic” includes photos of books such as Negroes With Guns, by Robert F. Williams, a black communist who fled to Castro’s Cuba and then communist China. Other recommended books include Assata: the autobiography of Assata Shakur; The Black Panthers Speak; Che Guevara Speaks; and Black Bolshevik.

Hill says that he doesn’t support violence or terrorism but has declared that “I believe that my work also follows in the tradition of Dr. Khallid’s revolutionary struggle for Black liberation.”

His “work” is now being paid for and facilitated by the “conservative” Fox News Channel. He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Editor’s note: since this column was posted, changes were quickly made to Marc Lamont Hill’s MySpace and Twitter pages and web site to eliminate some of the embarrassing information. For example, the tribute to Khallid Muhammad has been deleted. His Twitter Page has eliminated the multiple police photos of terrorist Assata Shakur and replaced them with photos of Muhammad Ali. Consequently, the links may not take you to the information cited in the column.  However, the information cited in this column has been verified, copied and retained.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This is an excerpt of one of his columns, which can be read in its entirety here.