An Update On the Campaign to "Free Mumia" And What You Can Do To Stop It

On October 23, 2006, the Fourth-Step Reply Brief of appeal and Cross-Appellant, Mumia Abu-Jamal was submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Philadelphia.

I have read through the 89 pages of the brief and aside from it being a cure for insomnia, and a mostly absurd bit of legal gymnastics, it is still worth a read if you are interested in Jamal's case.

I had actually expected better from Jamal's current attorney, Robert Bryan, who is a quite competent attorney and is clearly dedicated to his clients release from prison. But that said, he is trying to create something from almost nothing, and that is a difficult feat for any attorney, no matter their dedication or legal prowess.

To read Jamal's latest attempt at judicial relief go to http://www.freemumia.com/pdfs/2006OC~5.PDF

One can expect oral arguments in the coming months and we can also probably expect Jamal's appeals to be denied sometime in the next decade or so.

On another note, recently, the Mumia crowd has been petitioning the periodical "The Crisis", which is the journalistic organ of the NAACP to run stories on Mumia or articles authored by him.

"The Crisis" apparently covered the final days of multiple murderer, and Mumia worshiper, Stanley "Tookie" Williams. We all know how well that turned out. Mr. Williams is currently room temperature and the "Governator" who signed "Tookies" death warrant is about ready to be re-elected by a solid majority. Good luck there with that one, ole defenders of the Jamal faith

By all means, let the good folks down at "The Crisis" know that providing a soapbox to a cop-killing, cult apologist might not be the best move to make. They can be reached at thecrisiseditorial@naacpnet.org

And now onto to more fun things. Pam Africa will be turning 60 here soon. But don't expect a birthday party here in Philadelphia. I guess she and her MOVE compatriots have burned all of their neighborhoods and bridges and have nowhere else to go in Philly, so off to the the "Big Apple" they go

Instead the party will be held at a Church in NYC on November 18th. Yes, I said it, a Church. Not the Church of Satan or anything like that, a real live church. How about that for irony. Scam Africa and her increasingly small band of fools will be celebrating her years of scheming and lying at the Salem United Methodist Church on 129th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd in Harlem, New York from 5pm-9pm. And don't forget your checkbook. It still seems that the chronically un-employed Mrs. Africa has gotten all she has to get from welfare and the French, and is now in need of your hard earned cash.

Maybe Bloomberg's goons can show up and cite the Pam Africa fan club for some kind of smell violation. Quality of life laws indeed.

After a lot of bad noise I was able to get a phone number for the church. It is 212.678.2700. Call them again and again, as they like that kind of thing. Their email address is salemumcnyc@hotmail.com. Email them often and frequently, again that is the sort of thing they are in to.

I think that people of conscience would be remiss not to call this church and inquire as to why a "House of the Lord" is now serving as a house of celebration for a woman who champions the murder of police officers, is a member of a cult that practices child rape, (in fact two of Pam's daughters are victims of this unholy abomination), a group that has been linked to numerous deaths over the years...and well you know the rest.

If you need more info than by all means let me know.

Tony
sept27th2002@yahoo.com

There Will Be No Shelter

(I must give props where they are due. The Anti-Move blog has a new friend and editor. Now, maybe my commas will be where they belong and my run on sentences will not run on so long. Many thanks.)

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC)

If MOVE members and supporters have had to learn one lesson over the past two years, it is that they will no longer be able to just produce lie after lie after lie and, expect people to simply accept it as truth.

That much is self-evident.

It is also becoming more clear that the group is in a very real state of decline.
Look at their website for instance. Ramona Africa, begging and pleading for "speaking engagements," in order for her to cash in on her professional martyr status. Apparently, MOVE is having some difficulty in the fund-raising department.

What a pity.

It has also been a month since the Philadelphia Inquirer article came out, in which, MOVE members/supporters are not so subtly linked to the murder of John Gilbride. There is still no "official" response from MOVE. Am I the only one who finds this deeply suspicious? I cannot conceptualize of anyone, in or around MOVE, being so sunk into the cult's despotism, that they are completely blind, deaf and dumb to what everyone around them seems to already either know or suspect. On the contrary, I think there are many in MOVE's midst whose minds are racing, and that a question is starting to resonate with more and more fervor.

"What am I doing here?"

Now I see that the website promoting the pro-MOVE documentary at movefilm.com has gone blank.

Mario Africa, one of the group's more intelligent and charismatic members, has quite clearly abandoned John Africa's revolution, and has gone off to New York to do whatever it is that he does. Interestingly enough for me, is the fact that although he is no longer with MOVE, he seems quite ready to cash in on his former attachment to the group. Too bad he does not posses the spine to say anything remotely truthful about the group to which he was attached for so many years. This is not altogether surprising.

The more deeply dedicated one is to an authoritarian entity, the more difficult it becomes to extricate oneself from the predicament. At some point, if you go deep enough, you will have found that you have surrendered your soul in exchange for a false sense of security, plagiarized emotions, and a foundation in which all things are given context. Solipsism sets in, and your world shrinks.

If, and when, someone makes their way out of this darkness, they will find a whole new set of problems, some of them clear, many of them not. No path in life is easy, but there is a greater sense of contentment knowing without a doubt that your destiny is not being totally manipulated and subordinated, by those whose interests rarely, if ever, coincide with yours.

I am sure Mario is having a hard time making his way. However, by continuing to pretend that MOVE is something that it is not, and by keeping silent about the death of John Gilbride, he only furthers the cult's agenda, and subsequently, the enslavement of his own children.

I am in no position to let him off the hook. Nor should I, but neither should anyone else.

He, and his former/current/ whatever they are, friends in MOVE, will not be able to escape the consequences of their actions. The truth is making it's way out, and whether it is through my websites, or people figuring it out on their own, the facts are what they are, and none of MOVE's equivocations can alter reality.

There will be no shelter for the murderers of John Gilbride, nor will there be for those who give them a place to hide and peddle their lies.

Mario Africa's Latest Incarnation

(The Latest Incarnation of the former "Mario Africa" on the left)

There are people in and around MOVE who know what the deal is with the cult and then there are those whose eyes and minds are glazed over. Mario Africa belongs to the first category. Mario was up to his bloated neck in the terror campaign waged against John Gilbride while at the same time serving as a kind of recruiter and mentor for newer MOVE supporters.

And although the now clean shaven, bald-headed, ex-MOVEer has apparently left the cult to which he called home for so many years, he still seems unwilling to say why.

Now he has his own Myspace webpage at

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=113901301

proving that if the internet is the information highway, that Myspace is the seething gutter where the refuse goes.

What I find interesting about Mario's site is that while there are brief mentions of, Mumia it does not mention MOVE or it's founder John Africa. In MOVE, John Africa is venerated as a god, if not the one and only God. For Mario not to mention his former deity on his new site serves my point that he has forsaken his former rulers and struck out on his own.

It also appears that he no longer resides in Philadelphia, but instead has pulled up stakes and gone off to Brooklyn NY. No mention of the MOVE "family" he left behind aside from some very bad poetry dedicated to the children he apparently abandoned to the cult. One can only hope that one day his poor kids will be taught to read so that they can see that daddy cared, just not enough to get them out of the hell that they will grow up in under MOVE's oppression.

I realize that there will be those reading this who will suffer under the misaprehension that I am being unjustifiably hard on poor old Mario. The argument could be made that yes he has left MOVE and wants to leave the past in the past and get on with his life. The fact is that I know of former MOVE adherents who have done just that and I have no quarrel with them. The problem I have with Mario is that he knows exactly what MOVE is and he knows precisely what MOVE has done and to whom the group has done it to and yet he continues to pretend otherwise.

What is perhaps even worse than his silent complicity is the fact that he paints himself as some kind of crusader for justice and even proclaims himself amongst many other things to be an "anti-authoritarian". The hypocrisy of this man is severely testing my intestinal fortitude and I am afraid that if I go further with this subject that my Taco Bell dinner will soon make it's way onto my keyboard.

Now, while I reject MOVE's brand of ad-hominem attacks and crass rhetoric I must admit that sometimes only certain words can apply to certain kind of people. And when I think of Mario the only thing that comes to mind is "motherfucking coward". That about sums it up...

Counterpunch.org Publishes Lies For Mumia

Editors Note: Alexander Cockburn from Counterpunch.org emailed me today and informed me that he also believed the pro-Jamal article posted on his site counterpunch.org was riddled with errors. The article was subsequently removed from the site, but is still making the rounds throughout the internet

The folks down at counterpunch.org have reached a new and surprising low in their efforts to re-ignite the movement to “Free Mumia”.

A recent article posted on the site by Robert Wells was truly and provably more fiction than fact, a piece of bad propaganda aimed at the gullible and ignorant.
Wells, in his attempt to resurrect the long discredited notion that Jamal was caught up in some kind of Serpico like conspiracy looks for the lowest common denominator and quickly finds it.

The tyranny of assumptions and patently absurd arguments put forth by Wells have not only been argued away by Jamal’s detractors, but more importantly they have been rejected by many of Wells comrades in the “Free Mumia” cause.

That Wells makes no mention of this fact in his article is telling and should be embarrassing for him being that one of those who pointed out the absurdity of the Beverly hoax is Dave Lindorff who also writes for counterpunch.org and wrote a book sympathetic to the Jamal cause.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. Wells flat out lies when he claims that there were “multiple witnesses who saw two killers dressed in army fatigues shooting Daniel Faulkner and running away”.


Robert Wells also casually and without any effort to list facts asserts with glib self-assurance that

“Other Philadelphia cops had been assaulted or killed for the same reason both before and after Daniel Faulkner's death”

As someone who was in the Mumia movement for nearly eight years I had never heard such an assertion and I would challenge Mr. Wells to provide proof of his allegations or cease in making them.

What is a fact is that Cynthia White, Albert Magilton, Michael Scanlan, and Robert Chobert all saw parts of the shooting of Officer Faulkner and all would identify Jamal as the killer.

Wells also brings up the affidavit of Jamal’s brother William Cook, an affidavit that was nearly twenty years in the making. Never mind the fact that Cook’s affidavit not only contradicts some of the witnesses testimony but also contradicts Mumia’s own affidavit. Moreover, when it counted, when William Cook could have exonerated his brother at the scene of the shooting, he chose instead to offer a meek “I ain’t got nothing to do with it”.

Another flat out lie crassly spouted by Wells is that Jamal was shot by Police Officers arriving at the scene of the crime. This is again something that is contradicted by nearly all witnesses at the scene and is also contradicted by the ballistics evidence presented at Jamal’s 1982 trial in which the .38 caliber slug removed from Jamal was linked conclusively to Faulkner’s gun.

Yet another lie Wells manages to pull out of the air is the one about Jamal being fired from his journalism jobs due to police pressure. None of Jamal’s co-workers, even those supportive of Jamal’s cause do not lend credence to this myth.

One of Jamal’s co-workers described Jamal’s work ethics this way:

“His behavior at the station was out of control. He behaved like a guy who was high. He acted like he was high.”

The fact is that by the night that Jamal shot Officer Faulkner he had sacrificed not only his career but also his family life in order to pursue his acknowledged and growing obsession with the MOVE cult. He had pissed away his credibility with silly and inane antics on air and off. Simply put the police needed to do nothing to ruin Jamal’s life and career, like so many other of those who have fallen under the sway of MOVE, he had, by that time, done a fine enough job on his own.

But the bottom line is that the Beverly confession is self-evidently false. And I am by no means the only who espouses this view. Although Robert Wells pays lip service to the fact that Jamal’s lead attorneys refused to come forward with the Beverly hoax he fails to mention why. In his pro-Jamal book, Executing Justice former Jamal attorney Dan Williams states emphatically that he was not going to embarrass himself by “running with such a patently outrageous story on the most visible death penalty case in the world”. The esteemed head of the Jamal legal team at the time, Leonard Weinglass concurred stating that “the (Beverly) story was insane”.

After canning Weinglass and Williams, Jamal proceeded with the Beverly concoction and in doing so helped to discredit not only the movement to free him, but also by putting Beverly into the equation he also undermined many of the previous legal arguments that had been put forward on his behalf.

In essence, none of the witnesses neither prosecution or defense, could place Beverly at the scene. Not only is he a hitman for unamed mafioso, but he also possess magical invisibility powers.

Needless to say, the Beverly hoax failed miserably and the two attorneys who were the main proponents of it were canned by Jamal for their efforts.

Jamal’s current attorney, Robert Bryan avoids the Beverly snafu like the plague. And instead of characterizing the deceased officer as a “Serpico” like figure, he paints Officer Faulkner as a brutal racist thug and seems to be inching closer to arguing that even if Jamal had shot Officer Faulkner, that the young officer had it coming.

What is perhaps most interesting to me is that Robert Wells seemingly did not read the book written by fellow Jamal supporter and colleague at counterpunch.org, Dave Lindorff.

Make no mistake about it. Lindorff’s book is horribly slanted in favor of Jamal and is tainted by his own radical leftist views, views that apparently have caused some disconnect between him and reality. But that said, Lindorff is not an idiot. He, along with Leonard Weinglass, Dan Williams, and likely most other people who actually investigate the case don’t think much of the Beverly myth.

According to Lindorff:

“Beverly’s story strains credulity further because of the tale of his escape. What would such a craven group of corrupt cops, having succeeded in hiring a lowlife Mob Hit Man to rub out one of their own, actually help him to escape, leaving him alive to eventually tell his story? How much easier, once he was in the subway tunnel, to have shot him, leaving investigators with a nicely tied up tale of a cop killed by a mobster, who was than killed by his own people. End of story.”

Of course, the above illustrates just one of the two dozen or so holes in the Beverly story, but it says something when one of Jamal’s own supporters cast serious doubt on the fallacy that Robert Wells is attempting to pass of as truth.

And it is not just the Beverly confession that Lindorff dismisses. He also calls into question the whole “mob-hit man scenario”. In one of the more lucid passages in his book he states:

“There are a lot of problems with this Mob Hit Man scenario. First....regarding Cook’s claim about Freeman, how did an allegedly premeditated murder come to take place during a chance traffic stop? Mob assassinations are often carefully planned and carried out, and this seems like an unlikely set of circumstances for a hit man to use. This plot, in order to work, required having Faulkner turn into Locust (where Beverly and some corrupt cops were waiting). Yet he did so not out of predictable routine, but by chance he followed Cook.
There were...too many variables in Faulkner’s free form tour of duty for the scenario as described by Beverly to have worked...it seems extremely unlikely that a group of corrupt police would choose to execute a colleague in a busy locale where any number of witnesses would be on hand to see and report what happened”

Mr. Wells wants to make something of the fact Arnold Beverly had an issue with obtaining a drivers license. I do not know whether this is true or not, but I can say that I personally have no problem with a career criminal like Beverly being disallowed on the roads of Pennsylvania. Beverly has a rap sheet a mile long. He has six convictions for burglary, seven for theft, two for receiving stolen property, three for criminal conspiracy, and nineteen others including rape and terroristic threats. The benevolent Arnold Beverly was sent to jail six times, two of which were for up to 10 years. That the repeat offender may have an outstanding hit and run issue should hardly be a surprise to anyone, regardless of where the clearly truth challenged Arnold Beverly claims to have been at the time.

Even Robert Wells has to acknowledge that the Beverly confession may come across as suspect to some people. He kind of nervously states that:

“Sometimes people who see it claim they don't believe him, that he doesn't look convincing. That, of course, is not the point: the way to test the truth of what Beverly says is to bring him into court, depose him, cross-examine him, and investigate what he has to say.

The point is that Philadelphia law enforcement has blocked that; the question is, what have they got to hide?”

The above is a kind of straw man argument. The whole point of a judicial review is to sift through the multitude of claims as posed by the defendant and prosecuters and proceed forward to rule upon issues that are deemed legitimate and credible.

The fact that Jamal himself had initially dismissed Beverly’s story as incredible, as had his pricey and more than competent attorneys, is more than enough reason not to allow what is clearly a desperate stalling tactic on behalf of Jamal to clog up the court docket.

If even such pro-Jamal entities like Leonard Weinglass, Dan Williams, and Dave Lindorff can recognize that Arnold Beverly is a fake, one has to wonder what is wrong with Robert Wells that he believes he can pass his crackpot theories off as fact.

It just goes to show that in the frantic effort to free a murderer that no lie, no matter how incredibly off the wall is out of bounds for those still cynical enough to employ them.

MOVE's Silence

For an Organization that purports to stamp out “misinformation” wherever and whenever it rears it’s head, the members of MOVE have remained uncharacteristically silent in the face of one of the most damning news articles written about the cult since 1985.

Anyone familiar with MOVE’s members and supporters is also familiar with the fact that when MOVE is mentioned in the media that MOVE adherents are correspondingly found generally falling over themselves in order to “respond” or to demand “equal time” in the offending medium.

Take in point the current responses that are still popping up over the relatively benign article written by Stu Bykofsky for the Philadelphia Daily News back on Sept 18th. As recently as October 5th the website of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia had posted yet another hysterical retort to Bykofsky’s column by MOVE.

Suspiciously the group remains mum on the Philadelphia Inquirer article in which MOVE is more or less implicated in the still “unsolved” murder of John Gilbride.

Now, I have written about all I can about John’s killing and who I think bears responsibility. And if you care to you can peruse this blog and my website for more insight into my take on this matter.

Make no mistake about it. MOVE and it’s ever shrinking cadre of zealots have not “overlooked” this article. They have deliberately and consciously made a choice to not respond. I assume, but cannot prove, that their calculated silence is a result of a strategy of ignoring uncomfortable truths as opposed to amplifying them by responding.

As much as this is a departure from MOVE’s general modus operandi, it has, however, been part of how the group has “dealt” with the murder of John Gilbride. They avoid any discussion of John’s death when they can and when they cannot they spin wild conspiracy theories designed to divert attention from themselves and the true circumstances of the murder as much as they possibly can.

Another, more crude tactic the group employs is to employ various methods of intimidation or psychological warfare (see Alberta Africa’s letter to Jack Gilbride, John’s father as evidence of the latter.)

For me there are two overriding issues that remain unresolved. When and not if John’s killers will be brought to justice and secondly just how much longer can MOVE’s supporters ignore the fact that they are in company of killers whose death-cult mentality endangers all of their futures?

MOVE's Words Of Hate

(Originally posted in March of 2005)

It wasn't enough for MOVE members and supporters to try and ruin John's life and the lives of his family.

It wasn't enough for them that he was savagely murdered by cowardly thugs as he sat in his car.

It wasn't enough for them to create and propagate cruel and hateful lies about him after his death.

MOVE had to go further. They had to torment the man's family with hateful and vile words designed to illicit fear, silence, and even more pain.

What follows is a letter to John Gilbride's father from the MOVE Organization. It is a letter to a man who had to endure the murder of his only son and then, not long after, the untimely loss of his wife to cancer.

It is a letter that illustrates the extreme lengths that MOVE will go to in order to inflict suffering upon those that they consider their enemies. It is a letter that MOVE would rather people did not see, which is of course why I am reprinting it here.

I think that MOVE's own words do more to make my point that this is a group wedded to a destructive and vile ideology. Rather then being the example of revering and protecting life, as they claim. MOVE is a source of misery and hatred.

Letter from MOVE

Jack Gilbride Don't you ever try to label our sister, Alberta Africa, as a murderer. Her Belief, MOVE Law, don't teach murder, her Belief is Life! If anybody is guilty of murder you are, not our sister. All she ever did was love John, and take care of him. She encouraged him to be right, strong. You, on the other hand, abused him mentally and physically. You never loved him, all you ever did was resent him, out of jealousy because he was better looking than you, taller than you, he was young and you were old. Everything John ever had in his life that was good you tore it down and took it away from him. You're a jealous, hateful old man, and its you, if its anybody, who's responsible for John's death. Just like you're responsible for Francis death. You drove that woman to her death with your hate, spite and vindictiveness. She wanted to be a grandmother to the son John and Alberta had, and they both wanted her to be that too, so did MOVE, but it's you who stood in the way of all the love and family we all could have had, steadily pushing your hate, bigotry, racism and goddaming pride and ego, all rooted in your own personal self-hatred and jealousy. Just look at what you've done. You've messed everything up for everybody. John loved you and trusted you, he believed in you, but you weren't really a father or a friend to him, and you manipulated his love and trust for your own maniacal schemes. You took John away from his family, his wife, his son, his home, and you took away his happiness. You took John away from his son, leaving his little child without a father, you took Alberta's husband away from her, you took our MOVE brother away from us, and you took Francis' first grandchild, her grandson who she loved, away from her. You are truly a demon straight out of hell Jack, and The MOVE Org. hopes you live a long time so that you can feel some of the hurt, pain you've caused life to suffer, but don't you ever call Alberta Africa, or no MOVE member, a damn murderer, because it's you who's the one that believes in murder, not MOVE.
The MOVE Organization