Pro-Mumia Indoctrination At Temple University

(Pic of "Educators For Mumia)

The Organization, Educators For Mumia Abu-Jamal is sponsoring a "Teach In" on Mumia’s case on October 26th at Temple University in Philadelphia.

The title of the cop-killer, pity party is ironically titled "Mumia Abu-Jamal: Scholars Review The Case" It is scheduled from 3:30pm to 5:00pm, and while I don’t yet have the exact location I will post it as soon as I do.

The official school sponsor of the pro-Mumia event is the "Dissent-In-America Teach-In" program that is run by Professor Ralph Young of Temple University. Perhaps, Professor Young will offer as an introduction to the pro-Jamal forum, an explanation as to how shooting a Police Officer in the back has anything to do with dissent. But I doubt it.

Professor Young as you might expect, is a far-left extremist who uses his classroom as a bully pulpit to indoctrinate his students with his agenda of thinly veiled anti-Americanism. His class has been described as not being so much about dissent as it is "an immersion in radical politics" that is explicitly designed to convert students into adopting Young's corrosive agenda as their own.

While there is a strong argument to be made for studying dissent in a multitude of forms, Young’s examples are of those who sought largely to destroy America. Clearly, this makes his class much more about celebrating treason than it is about teaching dissent. Which explains his support for Mumia, whose "anti-system", MOVE inspired brand of cultish nihilism, is treason in it’s most extreme and vulgar form.

While Young is the sponsor, two other Professors are slated to actually run the "teach-in". Interestingly enough, they have to be bused in from out of town. Perhaps because the Professors in Jamal’s hometown of Philadelphia, committed leftists as they may be, are not so naive as to be pulled into Mumia’s faux cause.

Professor Johanna Fernandez is from Baruch College in New York City and when she is not stumping for Mumia with other "Free Mumia" professors, she is writing hagiographies on behalf of streets-gang-turned-political-gangs like "The Young Lords". Like her hero Jamal, she also has worked to revise the bloody history of the dictatorial Castro regime in Cuba. She was member of The International Socialist Organization. The ISO, if you don’t know, is one of many crypto-Marxist groups that latch onto whatever cause is fashionable, in this case Mumia, in order to lure people into their little cult.

The other Professor on the deception agenda is Professor Tameka Cage who hails from the University of Pittsburgh. In an essay dedicated to Jamal, Professor Cage calls upon her fellow educators to place Jamal amongst great African-American leaders like Martin Luther King. She argues that "We must add to the list of great revolutionary-activists the name, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Let us rewrite and supplement our textbooks now. Let us historicize Mumia now. Let us incorporate Mumia’s life into our syllabi now. It is time for educators around the country and the globe to use our influence to make ourselves, and our students aware that there is greatness among us in Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In her rambling, homage to the convicted murderer, Professor Cage, cannot even bring herself to mention Police Officer Daniel Faulkner’s name, let alone bother arguing that Mumia did not shoot him.

This is of course, the latest fad in the Mumia cause, to merely assert that his situation is one rife with injustice and that no matter what else happened, that he is a victim of bigotry. In this way of appealing to emotion, identity politics, and white guilt, the debate about Jamal’s case need not even be had. The whole situation is diverted from one about whether or not the man on death row for killing Officer Faulkner is in fact the real killer, to a broader critique of American racism, class warfare, and a whole host of issues that are designed to inject the "Free Mumia" debate with extraneous complexities as a means of obfuscation.

All the rhetorical beating around the bush is done with the explicit intent of keeping people from asking the simple questions. There are plenty of these questions to be answered, for example. If Mumia is so innocent, than what was he doing with a bullet from the dead officers gun lodged in his abdomen as his own gun lies next to him with all of the bullets fired?

Ask that question at the "teach-in" and get prepared to be subjected to a whole litany of purported police abuses going back to the mid-sixties, a lesson in the COINTELPRO programs run by the FBI, or perhaps the myth about Jamal’s crusading journalism prior to his murder of a Philadelphia Police Officer in the back, but don’t expect a viable explanation, or to be directed towards trial transcripts. That is because in Mumia-world, innocence or guilt does not matter, as author and the godfather of the far left himself, Noam Chomsky, recently noted..

It comes as no surprise to me that none of the Professors participating in this event have a background in criminal justice or the law. Nor should anyone expect that the Faulkner side of the equation be given a voice or equal time. Why should Jamal's devotees let a little impediment like the facts of the case get in the way of their revisionist history?

Being that I spent so many years as a Jamal supporter myself, I have a fairly good understanding of how the "movement" employs "group-think" as a means of keeping otherwise intelligent, rational people, from accepting the obvious fact that all of the evidence proves well beyond a reasonable doubt that Mumia Abu-Jamal murdered Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

The thinking goes something like this. "Mumia is a good leftist, as are the professors, if you want to be a good leftist too than you should support Mumia. If you are upset about the aftermath of Katrina, support Mumia, don’t like the war, support Mumia, hate Republicans or Democrats, free Mumia, want to put down the prison-industrial-corporate media conglomerate-military complex that rules the world, than you’ve gotta free Mumia. You don’t have to think or investigate this case on your own, we have done that for you. And if you happen to decide that you don’t want to free Mumia, than you are a racist who wants an innocent black man to die. This is because your support of Mumia is the litmus test upon which your political purity is tested."

And as anti-intellectual as this train of thought goes, thousands of people across the world who ought to know better have fallen into it's trap, caught up in the image of Mumia, the misconceptions about what he stands for, the romanticism that surrounds him, they have surrendered their critical faculties in exchange for acceptance. It is truly a sad testament to the left's inability to recognize things for what they are as opposed to what they want them to be.

This "teach-in", like all of the other Mumia inspired nonsense that has preceded it, is little more than pre-school politics disguised as a legitimate cause, run by people portrayed as freedom fighters, who in actuality are little more than cynical opportunists who have a knack for marketing the Mumia brand.

The Professors who are defiling academia by bringing this event to a classroom near you are substituting indoctrination for education, and it is the students, their parents, and you the taxpayer, who gets to foot the bill.