There are thousands of murderers currently imprisoned in the United States. Yet only one of them has the privilege of being made an honorary citizen of Paris.

On October 4th, the convicted cop killer and self-avowed Marxist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, was honored in a public ceremony during which Bertrand Delanoe, Paris’s socialist mayor, stood before a cheering crowd of 200 French leftists, raised a closed fist to the world, and shouted “Mumia Is A Parisian!”

Angela Davis, the Communist college professor whose name once graced the FBI’s Ten Most-Wanted List, was standing by at the ceremony as Mumia’s American emissary. She announced that Mumia’s honor is well-deserved because of the convicted murderer’s “profound sense of humanity.” She then went on to explain that the campaign to free Mumia “takes on a new sense in [the] face of American unilateralism, the aggression against the Iraqi people and the racist attacks against immigrants which can only further gnaw away at the vestiges of democracy in the United States.” To this, one can only imagine that her French audience replied with thunderous applause.

Though the French Left has never been known for holding pragmatic political views, its public declaration of solidarity with Mumia reaches new heights of absurdity, as anyone familiar with Mumia’s case can attest.

Mumia Abu Jamal was arrested on December 9th, 1981 for the murder of a 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer named Daniel Faulkner. The murder occurred around 4:00 a.m., after Officer Faulkner pulled over a man named William Cook for committing a minor traffic violation. Before long, a scuffle broke out between Cook and Officer Faulkner. At this time, Cook’s brother, Mumia Abu Jamal, an unemployed journalist turned cab driver, was working the neighborhood in his taxi. Purely by chance, Mumia came upon the scene. He parked his cab, pulled out his .38 caliber handgun, ran towards Officer Faulkner, and shot him once in the back, and once in the face. Before Mumia got off his second shot, Faulkner managed to squeeze off one round, which hit Mumia in the chest. When the arresting officers arrived at the scene, Mumia was sitting on a curb near Faulkner’s corpse, with a fresh gunshot wound incurred from the young officer’s weapon.

The evidence against Mumia is overwhelming. Not only did five witnesses see Mumia shoot Officer Faulkner, but the bullet pulled from Faulkner’s brain was matched to the .38 caliber handgun that was registered to Mumia and which was sitting at his feet when the police arrived at the murder scene. When Mumia was taken to the hospital to have his chest wound treated, three witnesses heard him announce, “I shot the mother-fucker and I hope the mother-fucker dies.” In addition, another witness at the hospital heard him declare, “I’m glad. If you let me go, I will kill all you cops.”

In the 22 years that Mumia has been imprisoned for this murder, he has never once provided authorities with a convincing story of who, if not Mumia, actually did shoot Officer Faulkner. The only alternate explanation of Faulkner's death would have to be that someone who looks just like Mumia, and who was dressed just like Mumia, ran out of the night, shot Faulkner for no reason, and then ran off into the darkness. This story, of course, still would not explain how Mumia ended up getting shot by Faulkner’s gun. Nor would it concur with the testimony of the five witnesses who all saw Mumia murder the young police officer.

To understand why the Left has launched a movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal from prison, one need only look at the ideas espoused by the perpetual jailbird. Mumia’s 1995 book, Live From Death Row, sheds some light on this subject, as it reveals Mumia to be a hard-line leftist.

In an essay in which Mumia addresses the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, for example, his left-wing views crystallize in these lines:

Ridiculous, sophomoric, paranoid passages like this constitute the sum of Mumia’s book. Yet his collection of essays has been endorsed by major newspapers. The Philadelphia Enquirer has announced that “Abu-Jamal is an articulate voice at the far side of this country’s great racial divide,” and the Boston Globe has hailed the cop-killer as “an incisive critic of American society.”

To the objective reader, Mumia’s tract is a strikingly unoriginal spewing of paranoid left-wing babble. The passage cited above is typical of the leftist drivel found in Mumia’s tract, which, pulling a page from the Noam Chomsky playbook, claims that the U.S. is “the most violent nation on earth,” and implies that the “system” in its present state is hopelessly evil and beyond repair. It is only because of these anti-American ideas that the left has adopted Mumia’s case and fixed a place for his innocence in the perverse orthodoxies of political correctness.

According to his own confession, Mumia was radicalized after being beaten up because of his part in a protest against the racist George Wallace, and at the age of fourteen he became a member of the Black Panthers. Though he left the Panthers in the early 1970s, because of the war that broke out between the Newton and Cleaver factions, he never lost admiration for the founder of that glorified street gang. He writes, “Huey [Newton] was…intensely curious, acutely brilliant, a lover of all the world’s children, an implacable foe of all the world’s oppressors.”

The reality is that Newton was one of the world’s oppressors, enacting his violent rage on any person who crossed him, including members of his own gang. Mumia chooses to ignore this truth. He, however, does not hesitate to spout off sweeping criticisms of the police. With the inimitable vitriol of a leftist partisan he writes, “Some thirty-eight Panthers were shot down by racist cops.” This statement, of course, does not take into account that it was the Panthers who declared war on the police, not the other way around. It was the Panthers who coined the saying, “Off the Pig.” And it was the Panthers who decided to “pick up the gun.”

After leaving the Black Panthers, Mumia’s radicalism was burgeoning, and to vent his extremism he needed to attach himself to another leftist fringe group. He writes, “There I was in the 1970s, a bored, slightly petit bourgeois, burnt-out ex-Black Panther who distrusted organizations and still simmered in a stew of generational rebellion. I felt all dressed up with no place to go…Then I met MOVE.”

The MOVE organization was founded in 1972 by Vincent Leaphart, A.K.A. John Africa, a man who was once evicted from his apartment for refusing to exterminate cockroaches, which he considered “the same as people.” The teachings of this crackpot are the sacred texts of the MOVE “religion.” A militant left-wing organization that currently boasts fewer than 50 members, MOVE gained public attention during the late 1970s when some of its disciples embarked on an armed standoff with the Philadelphia police. The confrontation lasted from May 1977 to August 1978, ending in an eruption of gunfire that left one policeman dead.

An official website of the organization displays the “MOVE Statement,” which poignantly captures the militancy of the group’s radical agenda: