Nine Years After John's Murder

In America justice has evolved from a concept to be held aloft as an ideal enforced by the divine to a kind of mechanism to enforce laws and punish the guilty while protecting the innocent. It is by no means a complete or by a perfect evolution. It is a bureaucratic institution that is as prone to flaws and prejudices as are the people who grind the gears and make it happen. It bears the scars and fallibilities of all of us. A flawed monument to our collective desire for order, it is as has been pointed out before not the best there is, but is rather the best we have right now.

True to its mechanical nature it is in constant need of upkeep and oversight, but most of all what it needs is a kind of indignation of and revulsion towards violence, hatred, murder, and all of the things that create pain and disharmony in society.

But what happens when people stop caring? What happens when those who have been charged with task to protect and serve fail to do just that?

I can tell you. You have a case like that of John Gilbride. Of course, John Gilbride is not a “case”. He is or rather he was a man. The story of what happened to him has been exhaustively told on this blog and in other places. There is no point in my retelling the story again here. If you care to know you will find out what happened you will read this blog and do your own research. I encourage you to do it.

For me, what happened to John is not now so much a cautionary tale of what can happen to you when you involve yourself and your children in an authoritarian enterprise, but is instead something only slightly more tragic. It is a tale of what happens when people stop caring or more likely never cared in the first place.

When I heard the news on September 28th that John Gilbride had been murdered the night before there were two thoughts that screamed out loudly to me. The first of which was that MOVE was responsible. My friends and the people I cared about had murdered another human being. This terrible truth reverberated through my body left me momentarily stunned. The next thought was equally troubling to me. I knew that the police would be coming. I could see it now just as vividly as I could now. I saw the black clad SWAT officers pushing their way into MOVE houses with concussion grenades, armed to the teeth and ready for anything. It would be swift and it would be violent. Anyone who dared to get in their way would be dispatched without hesitation. I simply knew this was going to be the case. I knew this because I was certain that if I knew that MOVE was responsible for John’s death that the authorities knew it as well. I also knew that the first forty eight hours of any police investigation was the most crucial. If no arrest is made within that critical time period the chances of an arrest drop precipitously. Trails go cold quickly. They would come. They had to.

However, as nervous nights turned into fearful days I sat and held vigil with my MOVE comrades and to my complete shock nothing happened. The complete lack of any kind of response on the part of the police was more shocking to me than the murder had been. I had been feeding on a steady of diet of MOVE propaganda for the past several years of my life. And if there ever were a bogey man in the weird and convoluted world of MOVE it was the police officer. The cops were the main instrument of the “system’s” oppression apparatuses. Cops were unfeeling “motherfuckers” who did the bidding of their corporate masters. Jack booted thugs who were all too happy to kick babies out of mothers’ stomachs and drop bombs on people. That they were not kicking in all of our doors, kicking ass and taking names was absolutely unthinkable to those of us who supported MOVE.

There were a few people who seemed genuinely unafraid of a police assault and these were the people whom I would have thought would have been the most fearful. The leaders of MOVE did not seem to be that concerned at all about an imminent invasion. Of course they paid lip service to the fear and talked the talk of paranoid revolutionaries whose time had come. But the reality was slightly different. The barricades that they had erected to protect themselves were made from pine planks and not railroad ties. There were no weapons to be seen. No bull horned threats to kill any cops who would dare to try to force their way into the houses that John Africa had paid for in blood. There was none of that kind of talk to be found. Nothing that was really meaningful anyways. MOVE was always spouting off rhetoric, but I had been around long enough to know when they were serious and when they were on a media manipulation trip and when the cult was deadly serious.

To this day I can’t say for sure how it was that the leadership of MOVE knew not to be too worried. I could speculate, but I don’t think that will do anyone any good. There has been enough of that kind of thing to go around.

What I do know is that MOVE was right to not be particularly fearful of the police. To be sure, the police did come around asking questions. Slowly and cautiously they stumbled forth like a half of a drunk rousted out of a languorous stupor. They came with all kinds of imprecise talk and a complete lack of understanding about the criminal entity that was MOVE. MOVE members and supporters had been told what to say and how to roadblock the baffled cops. Based upon everything I heard the police interrogations went practically nowhere. In the interest of full disclosure I spent hours with the police doing the best I could do to help them. I offered leads and ideas and recounted in as much detail as I could muster my time in MOVE and the ruthless campaign that we waged against John prior to his murder. I did what I could. To this day I know that there are people who think I held back or didn’t give all that I could. They are wrong. I gave all that I could but I was going to no more lie against MOVE anymore than I would lie for them. The police did not turn me against MOVE. I had been turned by MOVE’s own actions. I had become disgusted and so disenchanted with MOVE’s murderous nature and child abusive tendencies that by the time I talked to the police I was willing to tell them all that I knew. I wanted those in MOVE who were responsible for John’s murder to be brought to justice. I really believed that this would happen. Sad to say, but I don’t know that this will ever occur.

I am writing these words not out of obligation, but rather out of a kind of fear. I am afraid that nine years after John’s murder nobody outside of his still grieving family cares about what happened. I want to be wrong and I want desperately for someone to prove me wrong. But I don’t see it happening.

If justice is more than a concept if it really is to be an apparatus and an instrument for good than it needs people of good intentions to work its gears and maintain a direction towards setting things right. But what history shows is that occasionally for some and more often than not for the poor the wheels of justice grind to a halt and along with it hope.

I do believe that there is more to justice than that of our temporal and materialistic conceptions. There is a more cosmic aspect to it. John Gilbrides suffering ended when his heart stopped beating. The suffering of his killers just began. They will hopefully be forever looking over their shoulders. I hope they quake with fear when unexpected visitors knock on their door or when police cars pull up behind them in traffic. I hope that their dreams are haunted by John’s un-avenged apparition. If John’s killer or killers are not complete sociopaths than I am sure they are suffering for what they have done. But for me I do not hold such faith in a cosmic order to completely surrender my desire for justice that is more tangible. Something we all can see and all can feel.

Most of all I want John’s son Zack to know what happened to his father. The truth of it. Not the lies that he has been told by his “mother” and the rest of her MOVE minions since he is old enough to remember. The boy who was lost to the cult is growing into a man needs to know the truth in order for him to be set free.

MOVE Again Avoids Gilbride Murder

(It was last month that Philadelphia Inquirer reporter wrote a scathing article on MOVE’s continuing madness and now a month later MOVE has decided to “respond”. To be sure, it is not much of a response; it is essentially a long-winded ad hominem attack on a reporter who has meticulously covered issues surrounding MOVE and Mumia for the last several years.

Ramona Africa asserts that Kinney is attempting to bring MOVE down through “blatant lies”, but in her entire statement she does not bother to repudiate one of these alleged “lies”. I guess Ramona wants us to take her word for it.
It is no coincidence that Ramona does not mention the name John Gilbride once in her rambling statement. This is no accident. MOVE has been doing its best to keep John’s name from coming across anyone’s lips and they mostly managed to do that in the month of May. The notable exception is when producers from the T.V. show “America’s Most Wanted” showed up unexpectedly at MOVE’s program commemorating their destruction of Osage Avenue. The producers showed up and made the mistake of asking about John Gilbride and according to witnesses were summarily cursed out. One of the “AMW” producers was black and he got a taste of what MOVE did to their African-American neighbors as he was called a “nigger” by Pam Africa.

As usual with MOVE statements, you learn more about them than you do the target of their attacks. This attack on Monica Yant Kinney is paranoid, devoid of facts, and serves to divert from the pertinent issues through rhetoric that is designed to obscure reality and keep people from thinking.

That is what MOVE is about at this point. Whatever vision of MOVE that John Africa had has died. That vision was corrupted and perverted long ago by those who marketed his “revolution” for their own self-aggrandizement and personal gain at the expense of those who bought the lies. MOVE is run now by sick old women who can’t muster the courage to acknowledge that the “belief” that was supposed to liberate them has brought them a level of suffering that will only increase as they age, as the lies pile up, and the reality that John Africa chose fire and death over a life with them finally comes into focus.


MOVE ON MONICA YANT KINNEY (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER COLUMNIST)

Kinney is a delusional misfit who is on a futile mission to bring down JOHN AFRICA’S MOVE Organization. She is foolishly attempting to do what the entire U.S. government, with all of its resources, could not do. She is attempting to bring MOVE down through blatant lies that are designed to discredit MOVE but we of MOVE have a thirty-five year history as our credentials. What does Kinney have, access to a newspaper column. The only thing that Kinney can do is what the government tried to do for years in the early days of MOVE, misuse media outlets to spread ridiculous lies about MOVE in a feeble attempt to discredit MOVE and turn people against us. It didn’t work in the early days of MOVE when we would have been more vulnerable to such lies because people didn’t know us so well then, and it certainly ain’t working now when our consistently strong honest example is set, world-wide. All Monica Yant Kinney has in her arsenal is words, lies, but a thousand lies can’t stand up to the truth, can’t stand up to the strong clean righteous example set by JOHN AFRICA’S MOVE Organization. MOVE was here long before kinney and we will be here when she’s long gone. JOHN AFRICA’S MOVE Organization has our consistent righteous example in our arsenal and there’s nothing more powerful than that. To quote The Coordinator, JOHN AFRICA, quote-THE POWER OF TRUTH IS FINAL-end quote. Kinney can spread all the vicious lies she wants to about us but she can’t unset our example nor can she dispute the wisdom of JOHN AFRICA. Better and more so-called powerful people than her have tried, and tried with more vicious lies, tried by beating us up, beating pregnant MOVE women into miscarriage, killing our babies,unjustly jailing us, bombing us & burning MOVE men, women, babies and animals alive, but we are still here, still fighting this rotten system. All of these serious issues surrounding MOVE and Kinney talks about me wearing new sneakers. What does something as insignificant as sneakers have to do with justice or the vicious crimes committed against MOVE? Kinney says MOVE is fading out but where is the example of it. If we’re fading out, why is she still talking about us and how does she explain the world-wide support we have, the letters of support we get from all over the world, the world-wide respect we have? Madam Daniela Mitterrand, the former first lady of France, came to our home, ate with us and talked with our children who she was very impressed with; we have been received by members of the British Parliament, The European Parliament as well as Belgium and German dignitaries. Can Kinney claim the same. Furthermore, How does she explain why people from all over the world want to know how we’re able to stay strong and loyal, healthy and clear-visioned about our direction despite all that the government has attacked us with. Kinney thinks she’s qualified to interpret MOVE, and interpret us based on other organizations she may be familiar with but she found out that she’s wrong. Kinney knows that our brother Delbert Africa has always been known as a spokesperson for MOVE, always been known to speak to the media, always been known for giving clear sharp information to members of the media, and that his daughter was murdered in the May 13th bombing but she didn’t ask Delbert for an interview about the bombing, she went to our brother Chuck Africa. MOVE knows that any MOVE member is qualified to put out strong clear information but Kinney and other media people don’t interpret things that way. They see certain people as spokespersons and that’s how Delbert has always been seen. If she simply wanted information, why bypass Delbert a known spokesman or me as the sole adult survivor of the bombing who is known as a MOVE spokesperson and Minister of Communication for our family. She tried her sneaky tricks but she didn’t get what she was looking for because MOVE ain’t like other organizations that she’s familiar with, you can’t play MOVE people against each other. Kinney can play these impotent games all she wants but it won’t get her anywhere with MOVE people. She can lie on MOVE all she wants but it won’t change who we are and what we are and it won’t nullify the example that people all over the world see in MOVE. This is why, people world-wide, ask MOVE for advice on health, on how to raise their children, on how to take care of their animals, etc., and not Monica Yant Kinney. As was said earlier, Kinney only has words but MOVE has over thirty-five years of example as our credentials.


RAMONA AFRICA FOR THE MOVE ORGANIZATION

The Mumia Narrative

(Pic Of Billy Cook's car)
The release of the trailer for Tigre Hill’s upcoming film about the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner by Mumia Abu-Jamal has elicited fearful reactions by Jamal supporters. Two pro-Mumia articles have recently been released that attack the soon-to-be released documentary, this despite the fact that nobody has seen the final product.

One article, written by Anton Mestin, is so poorly constructed and argued that it is its own best argument against itself and the Mumia cause Mestin hopes to defend. It also contains the kind of allegation that is typical of the Jamal cause in that it assumes what should have to be proven when Mestin asserts that “Now Smerconish paid a filmmaker, Tigre Hill to produce a new vicious attack on reality. They will publish a film about Mumia Abu-Jamal and Daniel Faulkner in December 2009." Mestin offers no clues as to where he heard this allegation and makes the declarative statement as if no evidence is needed for it. For their part, the people behind the creation of “The Barrel of a Gun” stated on the film’s Facebook page that Smerconish “has at no time contributed any money to any aspect of this film or its marketing”. I would only add that if Mestin had any proof that Tigre Hill’s film was being funded by Smerconish that he owes it to everyone to explain where he received his information from and back his claims up with facts.

The other article attacking Hill’s film was written, or to be more precise, mostly cut and pasted by long-time Jamal apologist and conspiracy theorist Michael Schiffman. I have dealt with Schiffman on previous occasions and have exhaustively debunked his pro-Mumia propaganda on my blog. There is no need for me to re-visit and re-debunk Schiffman’s completely absurd and frankly laughable ideas about the murder that his friend Mumia committed. What I find interesting is just how frankly insulting to the intellect Schiffman can be. For example, he spends an extraordinary amount of time informing his readers that the man who prosecuted Jamal’s case is simply making things up and putting forth a generally impossible narrative of events concerning Officer Faulkner’s murder.

The fact remains that the prosecution case has withstood perhaps more scrutiny than perhaps 90% of all contested court cases in this country and it has stood up. Are there pockets of unanswered questions in the prosecutions case? Clearly the answer is yes. I don’t think that there is anyone who would deny that. However, the burden placed upon the prosecution is to prove “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and not necessarily to have a picture perfect reconstruction of the crime committed. It is their job to try and I think Jamal’s prosecutors did a good job in explaining what happened to Officer Faulkner (clearly the jurors agreed as well). Where the prosecution has remained consistent and impervious to serious scrutiny, Jamal’s defense, in it’s multitude of incarnations has shown itself to be lacking in not only scruples, but also in any kind of factual coherence. What Jamal’s varied defense teams have been short of in the truth department they have more than made up for in the realm of fanatical delusions. The defense team has concocted and contrived some of the most inane and absurd ideas ever that have ever been heard inside a courtroom. From phantom helicopters that do not exist, to dead men talking, to dead prostitutes rising from the grave to be seen in a Camden crack hose, the defense teams have had no shortage of clearly deranged theories to put forward in the service of Mumia. It goes without saying that the need for the defense to contrive so many scurriulous theories is because Jamal himself has never offered any explanation that comes close to being a coherent counter to that of the prosecution. That being the case, I find it particularly humorous that Schiffman would so shamelessly and without even a second thought, so aggressively go after Jamal’s prosecution. Especially considering the fact that Schiffman’s own ideas are so backwards, so clearly false, so ridiculous, and useless that Jamal’s current crop of lawyers won’t even embrace them, which says a lot.

It should be said however, that at the end of the day, Schiffman and company have no interest in the facts of the case, they simply want to “free Mumia” because he is first of all a political comrade, secondly Jamal still has some value as a marketing device, and finally because Schiffman’s world view demands a narrative that fits into the parameters that he is comfortable with. For Jamal’s few remaining supporters, it is this final factor that is most compelling and is the driving force. There was a time when there were large groups of people who very sincerely believed in Jamal’s actual innocence, but those days are over. This turn of events came about thanks to the availability of trial transcripts and the diligence of people who took the time examine just what it was that Jamal’s supporters were saying and directly challenging them with facts. There is little chance that someone devoid of a political agenda could look at both sides of the debate and conclude that Mumia is anything but a guilty man. Something that is more likely is that someone with far-left views will choose to ignore facts not favorable to their agenda and make ill-conceived assumptions based not on cold, hard, facts, but by a slavish devotion to ideological considerations. This is why Mumia still has any support at all. If Mumia had been an underemployed man of any color, with no history with MOVE or especially the Black Panthers and the same kind of evidence was presented against him, nobody would dare take up his cause. For the current crop of Jamal supporters it is about politics, while for those of us who advocate justice for Daniel Faulkner it is about justice.

In an article discussing the Jamal phenomena, Christian Peheim, (who also very effectively debunked Schiffman’s pro-Jamal drivel) drives home the point that politics is the driving factor in the Jamal cause with frank elegance:

“Courts in the United States do not care about political pressure by supporters of Abu-Jamal. Demonstrations in the streets will never change a decision based on the merits of an argument. French delegations visiting the mayor of Philadelphia will never achieve anything. By the way, if they want to achieve anything they would have to meet District Attorney Lynne Abraham and convince her. (They wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell.)

Political pressure could influence politicians only. Before the death sentence has been vacated, Abu-Jamal’s chances to receive clemency would have been increased by showing remorse. By putting the head in the sand and supporting his unbelievable claims of innocence his supporter have helped to forever destroy his chances to receive clemency. They did not help Abu-Jamal but abused him for their own purposes. No reasonable politician would ever grant clemency to a remorseless cop killer. If the death sentence will ever be re-instated and executed these supporters will partially be responsible for his death.

Actually, I think this scenario doesn’t seem to be very likely. After the decision of the Third Circuit Court Abu-Jamal’s fate seems to be rather clear. Most likely he will stay behind bars for the rest of his life, where he belongs.

Also in future his supporters will use him. He still can be useful as a shared topic for various left-wing groups and as a basis to collect donations. Who knows where all the money went which has been collected in his name?”

So, for the Jamal supporters it all rests on politics and the desperate need to create a narrative that conforms not to facts, but the political sensibilities of people that the narrative needs to be marketed to. This is why in Schiffman’s article; he goes far out of his way to mention the 1968 murder of Fred Hampton as a mechanism and as an aid to show a conspiracy to kill Mumia. In doing this, Schiffman is setting up a straw man argument. There is no correlation between the two cases to be found. Fred Hampton was a high ranking member of the Black Panther Party when he was gunned down. Through his charisma and adept leadership the Party was making inroads and had the potential to if not be a threat to Chicago’s political leadership, at least a threat to the Police that gunned him down. Mumia, on the other hand, had been out of the Panthers for several years, was no longer viable as a journalist, was on a downward trajectory in her personal life, and was absolutely no threat to any political order. Perhaps it was the recognition of his own failures and impotence that Jamal made the choice to put into action his now infamous quote from Chairman Mao that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. The murder of Officer Faulkner and the incarceration of Mumia rising not out of a fear of Jamal being a “threat” to the “system”, but rising out of Jamal’s own searing failures, professional, political, and personal. Jamal was the arbiter of his own demise, nobody needed to help him.

For Jamal supporters, the myth of his innocence necessitates new and even more elaborate theories as old ones are subsequently and completely discredited in the face of facts. There is a kind of infinite regress going on since Jamal’s first trial when the lies of that time failed obtain result, those lies turned into others, and still other lies arose as time and court dates came and went as did the amount of support. There is no reason for us to expect that pattern to change anytime soon.