The Left’s Idea of a Smart Guy
Mumia Abu-Jamal, intellectual illiterate.

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.