Fatirah Visits Mumia

(Ha Ha...Look at me. I have all these stupid people kissing my ass all day long...I am so smart to have killed someone and still have people love me...OJ ain't got shit on me...Long Live John Africa!)

It is extremely difficult for anyone with any sense at all of justice, or basic morality, to look upon the adulation of un-repentant killers as anything but madness under the guise of benevolence.

One needs to look no further than the "Free Mumia" cause to see just how high upon the pedestal that a murderer can be placed. Of course, Mumia is not the first, nor will he be the last of the exhalted murderers. However, at this point,it is Jamal who is arguably the top prize amongst cop-killer groupies, societal rejects, and politically inspired Euro-trash.

Every day, somewhere on the web, at any given moment, somebody is writing some kind of homage to Mumia.

Recently, the former webmaster of the website of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia, a woman named Fatirah authored a nauseating account of her visit with Mumia. And as much as it is sickening to read, not to speak of dealing with the brutish reality that people still think in the way that Fatirah does, it is something that I understand.

After all, I spent my honeymoon visiting members of the MOVE 9 and must confess that I shared with these destroyers of life, a kind of comradery that transcended mere political affinities. MOVE members and supporters became like family to me.

And so the obvious question is how do you reconcile a purported concern for justice with embracing people who clearly have no regard for life, not their own, not outsiders, and as history has demonstrated, not even their own children?

There are really two answers to this. The first is that like so many supporters of Mumia and MOVE, I was a "true believer" for much of the time that I was involved with the "causes".
I really did believe in the things that I was being told and I mouthed the lies to others while believing them myself. For that abandonment of critical thought I was rewarded by being allowed to live amongst MOVE and be a part of the things that were going on.

The second answer as to why people can treat people like Jamal as revered figures is through cognitive dissonance. It is a psychological exercise in which you ignore any and all information that conflicts with your existing beliefs. This is the reason why Mumia and MOVE supporters continue to ignore the facts of these cases and instead cling tenaciously to the myths, confusing fiction with fact and furthering their disconnect from reality.

That is how you end up with a seemingly intelligent and likely very moral person like Fatirah writing things like the following about a man who she very likely knows deep down is guilty.
Fatirah writes:

"It was the day that I had long hoped for, the day when I would be face-to-face with this great man of indomitable spirit, razor wit, and uncompromising insight and critique on our world and society...He is in good health and spirits and during the visit, many times he flashed that smile, and when someone said something funny, (often it was Mumia himself), the room echoed with his booming laughter...What was really surprising (to me), was his sense of humor. He can do dead on impressions of everyone from Dubya to Cuban expatriates, and believe me, they are hilarious! It was he who entertained us, rather than the other way around...Mumia is our symbol for all political prisoners; his fight is all of their fight. We must continue the struggle, we cannot lose this shining light! "

It is no exaggeration to say that a personality cult has built up around Mumia, to the point that it may as well be a text book example of how one is constructed and maintained.

Typical of demagogues, Mumia himself has participated in the re-writing of his life to make it more marketable to the extreme left who still adores the Jamal brand. The persistent myth of Mumia as a crusading, fist in the face of establishment journalist, prior to his arrest and conviction for the murder of Officer Faulkner is widely accepted as fact.

The audaciousness of this falsehood must be insulting to real journalists who were actually leading the charge against corruption in the city, but more importantly it helps portray Mumia as not only a victim, but a victim who was just doing his job as a journalist when he was "framed". How interesting it is that there is plenty of talk about Jamal’s pre-murder journalism, but not much in the way of proof that Jamal did or said much about police brutality and corruption prior to his arrest.

This whole shameful episode of revisionist history seems to lend credence to the Nazi axiom that says "the bigger the lie the easier it is to believe".

The fashion in which Fatirah and others choose to write about Mumia in comes very close to

describing him in a religious kind of way. This idolatry is actually somewhat appropriate considering that the "Free Mumia" cause now rests on a shaky foundation of faith. This has always been the case, but with rationality and common sense breaking through the Mumia mythology in the wonderful way that it does, one can only wonder how much longer before it crumbles. Of course there will always be people like Fatirah, whom I have already pointed out in other posts, has no clue when it comes to the facts of this case. As long as Jamal remains the dread locked, deep and steady voiced panderer, the terminally predictable writer of ideologically driven screeds, there will be people flocking to his side. Never mind the fact that he is a murderer.

As Noam Chomsky recently said in the trailer for the Mumia propaganda film "In Prison My Whole Life", "guilty or innocent is irrelevant".

This statement by one of the most prolific and respected scholars of the left is as infuriating as it is informative. This is what the Mumia cause has devolved to. With their myths stripped bare and rendered meaningless, many within the movement are clinging to the idea that even if Mumia shot Faulkner, that he did not receive a fair trial and should therefore be re-tried or set free.

This of course, is a much easier argument to make in the face of overwhelming amounts of evidence against Jamal than would it be to claim that he is "actually innocent". The facts do not support either statement, but certainly one can be more readily manipulated than the other.
As for Chomsky’s notion that guilt or innocence is not relevant, I must whole heartedly disagree.

Jamal being guilty or not is everything. I was told and so have thousands of people throughout the world that Mumia is innocent and has done nothing wrong. Working off of the premise that an innocent man may be put to death, people all over the world have quite literally given up everything in order to work for a man they believed to be completely innocent. I literally observed people who essentially worked themselves into the grave for this faux cause that they believed in with all that they had.

And all for what? So that Fatirah can have a good day with her cop-killing idol, whose guilt or innocence is now "irrelevant".