|
 hen
Mumia Abu-Jamal (né Wesley Cook) was sent to prison, most
of the sympathizers he would have two decades later were still filling
diapers. Youth sometimes needs a banner under which to rally; as
a result, Jamal disciples not only favor a new trial, but also tend
to the elevation of Jamal himself to the role of martyred idealist.
Setting aside the case itself — American Lawyer's Stuart
Taylor has made a convincing case for both Jamal's guilt and the
unfairness of his trial — Jamal as a thinker and writer is
selling a toxic product.
It is not axiomatic
that a murderer with a taste for Marxism and the blood of police
officers is not much of a thinker — but it is a surprise that
someone with Jamal's reputation turns out to be a propagandist of
such limited skill. For all his bubbling fame — prior to his
arrest and conviction in 1982, he was a rising radical-liberal journalist
in Philadelphia — Jamal coasts almost completely on radical
chic. His style, if one can call it style at all, suggests an earnest
eighth-grader aspiring to PEN membership.
He writes from
prison, apparently with access to the Internet, and apparently without
access to a grammar book. (Note to Mr. Jamal: Its doesn't
always need an apostrophe.) Jamal's 1997 portrait of Che Guevera,
the aptly titled "A Man Called 'Che,'" is mere rephrasing
of an encyclopedia biography. "Forgotten Founding Father"
comprises a few well-known facts on Thomas Paine, presented almost
without comment.
When he is
not a simple cipher for other people's research, he serves as a
mouthpiece for the tired old horses of discredited American Communism
and socialism. His frequent essays are mostly racist screeds and
anti-cop rants, decked out in lefty boilerplate. We are subjects
of the "corporate news machine." Police represent the
interests of "the propertied class." The FBI has waged
a "secret war" and a "white supremacist war"
against black Americans. The U.S. is a "nation that condones
and ignores wide-ranging violence." It's no surprise that a
death-row jailbird hates the system — but Jamal is offered
to the public as a crusading intellectual. His writing demonstrates
otherwise; readers on Left and Right have seen it all before, and
done a whole lot better.
Jamal generally
hurls his charges with little evidence beyond quotes from the occasional
sympathetic sociologist — though, to be fair, his intended
audience takes his canards as truth anyway (readers who don't subscribe
to the basics are already targeted for disposal after the revolution).
After September
11, Jamal predictably blamed "racist" America for the
deaths of thousands of innocents in the Pentagon, the World Trade
Center, and the fields of Pennsylvania: "Are Afghan-trained
rebels, from various Middle Eastern states, responsible for the
carnage of 11 September, 2001? Who armed them? Who trained them?
Who loosed them upon the world? Their very deadly expertise are
your tax dollars at work." With the wounds still fresh, Jamal
condemns Americans for thinking of terrorism in terms of lost American
lives — it's an abject lie; but it gets even worse — and
then he blames unjust death around the world on America, foolishly
citing, in particular, Cambodia. As if the Killing Fields were run
by someone other than the Khmer Rouge.
Of course,
as an anarchist with a wide Marxist streak, Jamal appreciates that
some deaths might be useful to a utopian state. (A cop or two on
the beat, say.) He is lucky that he lives here; if people actually
read or bought into what he writes, they might appropriate and apply
Jamal's compassion to his own case.
|
