The "Political Prisoner" Demonstration That Isn't

On July 1st MOVE and it’s front group International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal will be hosting a demonstration allegedly on behalf of political prisoners...I guess poor attendance at the latest “Free Mumia” and “Free the MOVE 9" has led to the strategists down at MOVE headquarters deciding that having an all inclusive demo will increase the numbers of people who come to their increasingly impotent scream-fests..

Pathetic. And completely hypocritical.

Pam Africa, the leader of ICCFMAJ and one of MOVE’s leaders condemns the death penalty in the United States, but defends its use in Cuba. She decries this country for allegedly holding “political prisoners”, but is mute about the political prisoners her friend and dictator Fidel Castro has crammed in his prisons.

And by political prisoners she means her comrades in MOVE and Mumia who are in jail for killing people.

A few years ago Pam traveled to Cuba embraced the communist despot and even appeared on it’s nationally run TV station to denounce the United States and acted as the tool that she is for the dictator’s propaganda machinery.

Just last year the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (which unlike ICFFMAJ is a real human rights group) issued a list of 306 prisoners who it said were incarcerated for political reasons. This list included the names of thirteen peaceful dissidents who had been arrested and detained in the first half of 2005, of whom eleven were being held on charges of, get this, “dangerousness.”

Where is George Orwell when you need him?

According to the same report, out of seventy-five political dissidents, independent journalists, and human rights advocates that were tried in 2003, as of 2005, sixty-one remain imprisoned. The sentences served for the crime of thought in Cuba average nearly two decades

Don’t expect Pam or any of her minions to even now about the horrendous human rights record of the Cuban government.

Don’t expect them to know that true political prisoner, and dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi just turned 61. The activist and Nobel peace prize laureate has spent 10 of the past 17 years behind barbed wire and isolated from the outside world, under “house arrest”. Her crime was speaking out against the ethnic violence and for democracy in Burma.

To consider Mumia and the “MOVE 9" to be “political prisoners” is disgraceful and only serves to diminish the fight to free the thousands of true political prisoners held in dungeons throughout the world.