Life Net Radio Responds

(The following is a response to my blog entry by Life Net Radio host Retiarius Zogreso. Zogreso and I have corresponded via email about the coverage of MOVE's symposium at the African-American museum by LNR. I thank him for taking the time to thoughtfully respond to some of the issues raised.)
-TA

First, I don't do "reportage". And I don't "cover" them in the
reporters sense of that word. What I do is more akin to an
extended public-service announcement that's open to anyone who
has something relevant to the range of issues LNR is
meant to address. If you want to raise awareness about
something, LNR is a way to do that. If you want to hear
journalistic reporting, we don't get a lot of that on the show.

This being said, Mr. Allen certainly does raise an interesting
point. I myself was surprised that Ramona Africa was the
curator of the exhibit. The curator. I would have expected an
exhibit on MOVE to be curated by Museum staff and to be
featuring material from all sides of the story.

The symposium the next day surprised me the same way: As you
can hear on href="http://www.lifenetradio.org/show371w.ram">LNR
#371, the panelists all seemed to be coming
more-or-less from the same side of the issue.

My role, though, is to give a platform to whomever wants one
and let the listener decide who is right, so I just did my job
(unpaid, by the way) and ran the shows with the same courtesies
I extend to all our guests.

Spokesperson For Cindy Sheehan is a "Friend of MOVE"

Karen Pomer just “knows” that Police Officer James Ramp was felled by “friendly fire”. How the spokesperson for anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan and long-time friend of MOVE “knows” this is anyone’s guess.

Much like the rest of the pro- MOVE crowd, Pomer is heavy on the rhetoric and light on the facts.

Back in the 1970’s Pomer was a wide-eyed, white liberal, Temple University student who produced a “documentary” on MOVE. The film presents MOVE as peaceful, health conscious, dreadlocked hippies, who would like nothing more than to create compost and be happy. Enter the evil, bloated character, that was the late Mayor Frank Rizzo cast as the devil himself and I am sure that you can figure out the rest.

It is no “Bowling For Columbine”, but MOVE has still gotten a lot of mileage out of the black and white sloppy mess of celluloid in its propaganda efforts.

Recently, at the partially taxpayer funded exhibit at the African-American Museum in Philadelphia, Pomer and a host of other esteemed panelists such as “I-Abdul John” made the crude case for MOVE’s revisionist history as fact..

According to Pomer and the rest of the panel, Police Officer James Ramp was felled by his own men, in their zeal to kill MOVE members.

As one might expect, there are more than a few problems with this scenario.

-MOVE and their ilk always seem to omit the fact that James Ramp was shot as he was assisting a fellow officer who himself had just been gravely wounded by gunfire from MOVE.

-One of the panelists asserts that the bullet that killed Ramp was never linked to any of the weapons found in the MOVE house. This is simply not true. The bullet was linked to a Ruger semi-automatic rifle that was purchased by Phil Africa and was found in the basement.

-Another panelist contended that the MOVE 9 was jailed for the killing of one officer. Again, this is simply not the case. The nine were convicted of the murder of Ramp as well as for the attempted murders of a number of police officers and firemen.

For More on the Case of the MOVE 9 and the killing of James Ramp you can go to my other website at themoveorganization.com.

Now, what I find disturbing about all of this is the fact that the people mouthing these easily disprovable myths are not your typical MOVE zombies (aside from I-Abdul John), but are rather, people of some respect in certain circles. I don’t know whether these people are just suffering from a lack of intellectual curiosity or a moral defect that causes them to stump for monstrous causes, and frankly, I don’t care.

I am of the believe that the next time Karen Pomer makes remarks against war that she should be reminded that she is a supporter of a cult that declared war on Philadelphia and in particular an African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Pomer, who circles the nation with her friend Cindy Sheehan preaching against war and violence supports a cult that effectively murdered the children in their care and tried to gun down a bunch of cops.

The hypocrisy is stunning.

MOVE, Mumia, and Yoda

Things are getting very bad for the “Mumia” Movement

Not only is there not much of a “movement” left, but Pam Africa has apparently no one around to craft propaganda for the cause, save for sub-literate MOVE supporters like Kevin Price.

Big mistake.

My old comrade Kevin has pieced together all kinds of rubbish about Mumia and has creatively titled his contribution to American letters “The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal Information Booklet”... which is funny enough in and of itself. Sounds like maybe Yoda came up with the title.

“Smell like dogshit and body odor MOVE people do”

(Sorry I couldn’t resist)

What is even more humorous than the title, is some of the information contained therein. It seems that for the sinking Mumia cause, any old thing will do. The “booklet” is a string of fatuous non-sequitors crudely disguised as legal truths that are pulled together with extreme disregard for the intelligence of the reader, not to mention anything at all resembling common sense.

In the “booklet” Kevin provides information that on the one hand asserts that Mumia was “framed” for the murder of Faulkner for his “political beliefs”. And just few pages down from this boldly idiotic idea, Kevin than introduces the idea that the somewhat new cop was “whacked” by some angry mobsters.

Well, which is it Kevin? You certainly can’t have it both ways.

Kevin doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Kevin is just writing this trash up because someone in MOVE told him to do it. He has done it hundreds of times before, just like I used to. It doesn’t matter to him that the information that he is disseminating is self discrediting in some places and mutually contradicting in others. He is just following orders and in doing so is throwing all kinds of “Mumiaidiot” shit up against a wall desperately hoping that some of it just might stick long enough for someone to come up and smell it.

People caught up in cults surrender their intellect at the feet of their chosen deity.

For Kevin, his intelligence, integrity, critical faculties, and desire for freedom have been deposited faithfully at the alter of John Africa, or to be more specific, Alberta and Sue Africa. He takes the role of hack without question and is happy for the promotion, for his efforts of banality, he is rewarded with pats on the back and contrived “love” from his fellow MOVE adherents. In Kevin’s wilting mind, the certitude of being in MOVE is more important than anything else, especially truth. Truth is something that he can never let enter the equation, or even contemplate. It is that which he fears the most, because he knows that it will take him right of MOVE and insert him squarely into the “real world”. And the “world” is something that from his time in MOVE he has been told is an evil and scary place.

Like in the Matrix, Kevin knows to stay far afield from those red pills

Allow me to let you all in on a little secret about MOVE and their supporters...They don’t give a shit that Mumia shot Daniel Faulkner. It is not something that stirs their conscience in the least. All they know is that on December 9, 1981, John Africa sent his followers down to the hospital where Jamal and Faulkner were taken. The killing of a white police officer by black radicals was great media, and John Africa just loved the attention. He apparently didn’t get enough of that kind of thing back in 1978 when his followers murdered another Philadelphia Police Officer.

After that night back in 1981, John Africa gave Pam Africa the task of working to “Free Mumia” and, well, the rest is history (or will be soon anyways).

There are a couple of other things worth mentioning about MOVE in relation to the killing of Daniel Faulkner and one of them is regarding Faulkner’s widow, Maureen.

Carlos Africa, if you have been around him long enough, likes to recount the story of what Maureen Faulkner allegedly did after she found out that her husband was dead. According to Carlos, she shut up the windows and started celebrating the death of her husband. Carlos says that he knows that Faulkner beat his wife and that she couldn’t have been happier to hear that his brains were blown across the sidewalk at 13th and Locust. Carlos really likes this story and finds the whole scenario just the funniest thing. What a sense of humor those MOVE people have.

Something else worth mentioning, and it is something that has troubled me for a long time. And that is the fact that in all of the time I was around MOVE, they never discussed their opinion on what exactly happened the night of December 9, 1981. They are, of course, experts on repeating what other people have said, but keep real quiet as to what they believe actually occurred. This silence has served them well over the years as it has allowed them to parrot whatever nonsensical theories that Jamal’s legal team of the week is spewing at any given time.

Like I said before, the facts don’t matter to cultists, only orders do. They will say anything, so long as it will ostensibly help their cause. The truth, for them, is often an obstacle to acceptance.

Integrity, intellectual curiosity, adherence to facts, and common sense are not things that can be allowed to exist within the constraints of an authoritarian cult. So it is with MOVE.

But don’t take my word for it, go ahead and read Kevin’s “booklet” and see for yourself..

It is available at phillyimc.org

Guess What PA and Philly Taxpayers?

Guess what Philadelphia and Pennsylvania taxpayers?

Not only are you funding a MOVE propaganda “exhibit” at the African American History Museum, but you are also paying for the media coverage of it.

That’s right. According to a spokesperson for the museum, the facility is partially funded by city and state taxpayers.

The “exhibition” which was put together by MOVE members, is set to run from October 7th through the end of this week.

If you are not sure just how grotesque this is let me spell it out to you.

*MOVE members murdered a city employee in August of 1978.
*A MOVE “supporter” murdered a city employee in December of 1981
*MOVE members attempted to kill more city employees in May of 1985 after they threatened to kill the Mayor (another city employee.)

So now Philadelphia city taxpayers are without their knowledge, funding MOVE’s historical revisionism and cult recruitment drive. And worse still, are helping to pay for positive media exposure for the event.

I discovered this ugly little fact after contacting Retiarius Zogreso of Life Net Radio, who “covered” the event and whose “reportage” was featured on WTMR-AM 800, a small station whose signal reaches listeners in Camden, Philadelphia, and Wilmington.

I had initially wrote Zogreso expressing my view that his reporting on the event amounted to little more than crude, cult, propaganda. Somewhat to my surprise, Zogreso wrote back and had this to say:

“Life-Net Radio is a free-speech medium, so if you find anything disagreeable or offensive, you can "correct" it yourself by sponsoring a show you do agree with. All we require is a reimbursement of the airtime cost, and I volunteer the labor and donate the Web space. The reimbursement is $47.00, which would be your total cost for an episode of your own. Our next available airdate as of this moment is the first Wednesday in January. Will that be suitable? Let's make arrangements. Please be assured that I will sound just as friendly to you as I did to the Museum and MOVE.”

Forty seven dollars for my own radio show! And a friendly host to boot! It is, I must admit, a hell of a deal, and maybe if I had no integrity, spine, or respect for journalism, I might just have to take Zogreso up on his offer. But for now, I will have to take a pass.

But now the question begged to be asked. If I would have to pay, did MOVE have to as well? According to Zogreso, MOVE didn’t pay, the museum did, to the tune of $94 for two episodes.

Now exactly what percentage of that $94 did Philly taxpayers have to pay? And just how much did taxpayers have to pay for the month long “exhibit” in the first place? I don’t know, but I can say, if the number is anything other than zero, that there is a problem.

Bottom line is that no taxpayer in any city, anywhere, in this country should have to help foot the bill for the propaganda efforts of a group that has killed city employees. Not one dollar, not one penny, should go to the efforts of MOVE. Not after the murders of James Ramp and Daniel Faulkner. Not after MOVE created the catastrophe of Osage Avenue that has already costs taxpayers millions. Not after all that MOVE has put this city through.

Now there are just a few days left to see the “MOVE Exhibition”. If you live in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, than I would have to encourage you to run out and see it. After all, you are helping to pay for it. You may as well see your hard earned dollars at work...