Mumia's Defense of Moussaoui

Mumia Abu-Jamal has a lot of experience in the defense of terrorists and murderers.

He has been doing it since before he murdered Daniel Faulkner and he will likely be doing it until the day he dies.

However, every once in a while, even Mumia can take things to far.

So it is with his defense of, or as Jamal might put it, “explanation for”, admitted Sept 11th co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui.

According to Jamal, it matters little whether or not the jury who holds Moussaoui’s life within their hands, gives the go-ahead for execution.

I am of the view that the families of those who Moussaoui helped to murder might have another take on this matter.

Perhaps as odious as Jamal’s not-so-hidden admiration for Moussaoui is the pseudo-intellectual sophistry that Jamal substitutes for logic.

For at the crux of Jamal’s argument is that Moussaoui, a child of Muslim Algeria, born and raised in secular France has “alienation” to blame for his descent into the terrifying world of Islamic extremism.

What I find most interesting about Jamal’s line of reasoning is that it is based in Marxist philosophy in general, and perhaps the work of Dr. Frantz Fanon (who himself, incidentally enough, was Algerian) specifically. And it is through this kind of convoluted “logic” that Jamal attempts to explain away the terrible crimes that Moussaoui has already admitted to.

Perhaps Jamal thinks his listeners are to stupid to realize that he is using socialist philosophy as a means of criticizing a socialist nation without any pause to consider the glaring contradictions he raises by doing so.

The problems of unemployment, issues of education, and racial persecution are all real issues in France, but they exist not because of U.S. hegemony, but because of France’s failed socialist economy and utterly corrupt government, a government, who not surprisingly, holds Mumia in high regard.

Jamal also wants people to know that Moussaoui was somehow deprived of his Islamic heritage by his mother who clearly wanted her children to assimilate into French culture.

But could anyone blame her?

It is all well and good to know that Muslims translated Socrates and Plato some thousand years ago, but the present world of Islam is not exactly spilling over with enlightenment.

There is currently the genocide in Darfur, be-headings of civilians, brutal attacks on houses of worship, suicide bombings, the killing of apostates, the violent persecution of Coptic Christians in the land of the Pharaoh, the butchering of nearly two-dozen Hindus only a few days ago in the disputed area of Kashmir, the rape of women and young girls that is so vile and common in nearly all Muslim societies, the war Islam wages on art, science, music,....And on and on.

Mumia also sees fit to point out that Moussaoui was radicalized by the first Gulf War as well as conflict in Palestine. Yet, he fails to explain just how flying plane loads of “innocent, men, women, and children,” into buildings filled with other “innocent men, women, and children” will bring about any kind of solution.

And while I am all for “laying axe to root” as Thomas Paine said, in reference to getting to the bottom of any issue, Jamal’s analysis simply falls flat.

His retrograde Marxist diatribe serves only the enemies of freedom who no doubt delight in the fact that the self-appointed “voice of the voiceless” has again taken up their cause.

But what can one expect from a man who still says proudly, “LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA”.