Mumia Abu-Jamal “murdered a cop,” and now, Brown University “will play music to celebrate his life,” reports Campus Reform:
Little did Mumia Abu-Jamal know that when he murdered Philly cop Danny Faulkner and said “I shot the mother f**ker and I hope the mother f**ker dies,” that one day Brown University might hold a celebration of his life.
Yet, Brown University will honor cop murderer Abu-Jamal (real name Wesley Cook) with a special exhibit highlighting his life and how it fits into concerns about “mass incarceration.”
The special exhibit this weekend at the John Hay Library is part of a three-day-long “symposium” on “mass incarceration” which in reality will celebrate Abu-Jamal, who killed Faulkner in 1981, and place his story into the broader context of the alleged victims of “mass incarceration.” The university acquired Cook’s papers last year, as previously reported by The College Fix.
The exhibit “will give scholars and members of the public a sense of the sweeping impact the American carceral system has had on millions of lives, including the family and friends of those who have spent time in prisons and jails,” according to the university…..It’s not clear what the sides of the debate are, but there must be one side that believes it was wrong to shoot police officer Danny Faulkner multiple times and another that argues it was good to shoot Faulkner multiple times. There are those who think “I shot the mother f**ker and I hope the mother f**ker dies,” is an admission of guilt and those who think it’s just a figurative phrase.
The Brown student newspaper largely copied over the fawning language into its reporting, writing that Cook’s “death sentence was overturned in 2001 [and] he is now serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania, raising questions about racial injustice and the ethics of the death penalty.”
The celebration of the cop murderer is part of other programming at Brown under the headline of “Voices of Mass Incarceration.”
The university will also host black Marxist Angela Davis…to discuss “The Feminist Fight to Bring Mumia Home.”
Angela Davis has been a big supporter of communist attacks on free speech and political dissent. She condemned jailed Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union as “Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism” who should “be kept in prison.” These dissidents were trapped in the world’s largest prison system, the Gulag, in which tens of millions of people perished during imprisonment or forced labor. Davis had no problem with the Gulag at all. Davis did not care about human rights in communist countries, where human rights could not be permitted to slow the pace of communism and its total transformation of society.
Yet Davis calls for abolishing prisons in America, where prisons are used to incarcerate murderers and thieves, rather than dissidents. This call results in her getting glowing coverage from progressive publications like the Harvard Gazette,
This is not the first time Brown University has celebrated Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal killed Danny Faulkner when he attempted to arrest someone else. Abu-Jamal “ran from across the street and shot the officer in the back,” and then “stood over the downed officer and shot him four more times at close range, once directly in the face.”
Davis’s support for Mumia is part of a larger pattern of condoning violence. As the National Review notes,
Davis is an unrepentant champion of domestic terrorists and murderers. In the early 1970s, Davis famously bought two of the guns used in a 1970 Marin County courtroom kidnapping-shootout perpetrated by Black Panthers, in which a superior court judge and three hostages were murdered. After being charged with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder,” Davis went into hiding. Even after the FBI caught up to her, and even after evidence showed that she had been in correspondence with the planners and well aware of their violent disposition, she was acquitted in 1972. Davis never stopped defending convicted Black Panther murderers, including those who had tortured a teenager to death, and yet she is still treated as a celebrity.
Davis collaborated with some of the world’s most nefarious regimes. The CIA estimated that at least 5 percent of the entire Soviet Russian propaganda budget in 1971 had been spent on propping up and defending Davis (as opposed to four going to the war in Vietnam). And she reciprocated eagerly and often. Davis first visited the Soviet Union 1972, a year of renewed political repression and forced labor. “Miss Davis Hails Soviet’s policies,” read a New York Times headline from August of that year. “Soviet ideologists raised Miss Davis to the status of virtual folk heroine during her California trial on murder‐conspiracy charges before she was found not guilty earlier this year,” the report noted. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn singled out Davis out tool of Soviet propagandists in his 1975 “Communism: A Legacy of Terror” speech.
In 1979, Davis would return to Moscow to collect her Lenin Peace Prize, praising “the glorious name” of the mass-murdering founder of the Soviet Union and his “great October Revolution.” On neither trip did she utter a single word of criticism or concern about the largest prison system that mankind had ever created. Only high praise.
When people like Davis decry “mass incarceration,” what they are talking about is a system that mostly imprisons violent offenders. As criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.” Most state prison inmates are there for “violent offenses,” according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. As the progressive Marshall Project noted in 2015, “Only 4 percent” of state prison inmates were “there for drug possession.” The percentage is even lower today.
