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| Philadelphia sues Paris over Mumia Abu Jamal |
| 2006-11-14 |
| City authorities in Philadelphia are suing their counterparts in Paris and its suburb of Saint Denis for honouring a US prisoner on death row for the murder of a policeman he denies committing, a lawyer said Saturday. Gilbert Collard, representing the US city, said complaints alleging "apology for crime" had been officially lodged with prosecutors in the French capital and the adjoining region of Seine-Saint-Denis. In October 2003 Paris awarded Mumia Abu Jamal honorary citizenship at a ceremony attended by the head of his support committee, black US activist Angela Davis, in a symbolic gesture against the death penalty. In April this year Saint Denis named a street after Jamal, 52, formerly known as Wesley Cook, a member of the Black Panther movement, who was sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of policeman Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia. His supporters, who allege the trial was a travesty of justice, managed to prevent his execution in 1995 and again in 1999, when a hired killer, Arnold Beverley, confessed to have shot Faulkner in a mafia hit. The death sentence but not the conviction was overturned in 2001, but both sides are appealing the decision. Collard said officials from Philadelphia would be coming to Paris within the next two weeks to make their views known. He said the aim of the lawsuit was not to damage any campaign against the death penalty, which he himself opposed, but the US city considered the honours bestowed on Abu Jamal abnormal. |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #8 Oh ho! So this international law suitery works both ways, eh? Not quite as amusing to be on the receiving end for once, I bet. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2006-11-14 19:45 |
| #7 If we could send the people of Philadelphia to Paris, we would kill more than 2 birds. France would get some stones, and Pennsylvania would go red state. I can dream, damnit. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-11-14 15:24 |
| #6 Isn't there someone willing to go over there and just put a bullet in this guys head? By the time the French Police have any clue what happened you could be long gone. Seriously, just dress in a veil and walk up to him, put a bullet in his chest/head/groin, jump in the car and get to the airport. Not like there will be "Screening" there. Is it wrong? Probably. But I wouldn't hold it against the guy/gal who did it. |
| Posted by: Charles 2006-11-14 14:55 |
| #5 Erik Svane is a swedish-american guy IIRC, but his pals are froggies. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-11-14 13:43 |
| #4 Good heavens, is this a Frenchman with some semblance of a clue? |
| Posted by: The Doctor 2006-11-14 13:02 |
| #3 The BAF changed the name of the mumia street, rebaptizing it "Daniel Faulkner street"; text in french, but plenty of pics and vids. http://labaf.blogspot.com/2006/07/la-rue-mumia-abu-jamal-rebaptise.html Discours d'Erik Svane : According to the movements in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, that Black Panther is a victim, nay a martyr, whose only crime aas to be a revolutionary against White America and who therefore had to be muzzled in a system in which he had no chances, no chances at all. Well, let's see how muzzled Black Panthers have been in the past and how few chances members of the Black Panthers have had in America's legal system. The party's former chair Elaine Brown, has written a memoir called "A Taste of Power". The party's chief of staff, David Hilliard, has written a memoir called "This Side of Glory". The party's minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, has written a book called "Soul on Ice" while William Lee Brent has written a book called "Long Time Gone". To that, we can add "Black Power" by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton as well as the movement's bible, "The Black Panthers Speak", which has gone through dozens of reprints since it first came out 30 to 40 years ago. There is also the cookbook by a leader of the Panthers, although it is true that "Barbeque'n with Bobby Seale" can hardly be called a memoir. As for the Panthers' defense minister, Bobby Rush, he has been elected and re-elected to the Congress of the United States. If it were so easy for the establishment to bring fake charges against Mumia, then why was Bobby Seale acquitted of murder charges in Connecticut in 1971? Why did the communist party leader Angela Davis win her trial and go free? A recent event will give a better idea of what all this Mumia Abu-Jamal noise is about. FYI, the Muslim cleric in Atlanta's inner city eventually escaped the death penalty — he was sentenced to life in prison without parole by a Georgia jury, which rejected the request of prosecutors to execute him. But isn't it strange that the valourous defenders of Mumia Abu-Jamal — who had no way of knowing that Jamil would never be given death or, for that matter, be executed — would at no point gather to defend this other former leader of the Panthers? Well, as it happened, the dead policeman (whose name was Ricky Kinchen) was black (as was one of his colleagues who was also shot but who survived). And this serves to illustrate the true nature of the people marching around the world, both within the United States and abroad. Their main raison d'être is not to defend Mumia Abu-Jamal, or to defend members of the Black Panthers, or to defend African-Americans. Their main raison d'être is to have a stick — and any stick will do — to bash Uncle Sam over the head with. Did Jamil deserve less of a defense than Mumia, whether the proper legal kind or the popular sort with demonstrators marching in the streets? If Daniel Faulkner had been black, nobody would have made a big deal about his murder. If the man who killed Daniel Faulkner had been white, nobody would have cared much about the crime either. Nor would his name have been bestowed upon a Paris street. If, on the other hand, the policeman killed by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin had been white, there would 50 demonstrations organized weekly around the world for the Atlanta Panther every week. In other words, the demonstrations around the world are all about what their members claim to fight: race-baiting. The movements, whether in America or around the world, are not for justice, are not for truth, and — in a sense — are not even for Mumia. They are all about seeking out and using whatever can be used to bash America with. Erik Svane est contributeur régulier de No Pasarán |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-11-14 12:24 |
| #2 Yeah, they'll probably build a huge copper statue of a woman holding a torch in their honor. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2006-11-14 07:47 |
| #1 I'm just surprised that the French haven't extended honors to the 9/11 attackers. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-11-14 06:52 |