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<font size=3><br>
</font><font size=4><b>From: "Taylor, Mark Lewis"
<<a href="mailto:mark.taylor@ptsem.edu">mark.taylor@ptsem.edu</a>
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Friends:<br><br>
Please find with this email a statement by <i>Educators for Mumia
Abu-Jamal (EMAJ</i>) about the recent “secret memo” that appeared among
some in the anti-death penalty movement, urged cultivating ties with law
enforcement for an advocacy against the death penalty, while downplaying
the need to stop Mumia’s execution. Many anti-death penalty movements in
the US have roundly denounced this already. This statement from EMAJ now
has now been affirmed and signed by our three coordinators, Tameka Cage,
Johanna Fernandez and Mark Taylor. It is posted on our web site, top and
center as “Site News,”
<a href="http://emajonline.com/">http://emajonline.com</a>, but for
convenience we also include it in the body of this email, below.<br><br>
It needs stressing that with a new slick propaganda movie by Tigre Hill,
promoted by the FOP and big funders, which comes out in September,
portraying Mumia as being just “out to kill a cop,” we need now more than
ever to preserve our unity in the abolitionist movement. Some good news
is that at the same time that this movie hatchet job comes out, producers
and directors supportive of Mumia are producing an alternative film,
<i>Mumia 101</i>, which presents a fresh and nuanced treatment of Mumia’s
case and struggle. See the attached letter about that newest movie, which
includes a trailer of the new film under production. Then, if you can,
support that movie with whatever donation you can (producers need funds
to finish it up on time!) and be present on September 21 in Philadelphia
to support it.<br><br>
Keep organizing everyone!<br><br>
Thanks, Mark Taylor, for <i>EMAJ<br><br>
<b>_______________________________________________________<br><br>
</i>EMAJ STATEMENT ON THE “SECRET MEMO” AND U.S. ABOLITIONIST
MOVEMENTS<br><br>
</b><a href="http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/53574">Reports have
leaked of a secret memo</a> in which some US anti-death penalty activists
showed reluctance to advocate on behalf ofPennyslvania’s death row
journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal. The memo was entitled, “Involvement of Mumia
Abu-Jamal Endangers the US Coalition for Abolition of the Death Penalty,”
It reveals what has been called the “throw Mumia under the bus” tendency
of the larger effort to abolish the death penalty. We have seen this
before.<br><br>
Every once in awhile someone on the allegedly liberal left tries to drive
a wedge between abolitionists of the death penalty generally, and those
struggling for Abu-Jamal. One of the more memorable instances was in 1998
when Marc Cooper, a Nation magazine writer, wrote in <i>The New York
Press </i>about how the movement for Mumia Abu-Jamal is “a bane” on the
more solid committed folk trying to end the US death penalty.<br><br>
This year’s memo is a special affront, presuming that there is some
virtue in abolitionist movements “cultivating” relations with the
Fraternal Order of Police [FOP], which long has been a vigorous advocate
for Mumia’s execution and which keeps
<a href="http://www.fop.net/causes/faulkner/projamal.shtml">a “list” of
individuals and organizations</a> that support Mumia’s struggle. EMAJ
condemns any such planning between abolitionist movements and the FOP.
For anti-death penalty movements to cultivate relations to a police union
like the FOP, which is unabashedly lobbying for Mumia’s execution, is at
best ineffective, at worst a collusion with the forces that keep
state-sanctioned killing in place in this country. Moreover, it overlooks
the long history of egregious violence and violation, which law
enforcement in the U.S. has visited upon communities of color in the
U.S.<br><br>
To be sure, police, prosecutors and others of the criminal justice
establishment have spoken out for Mumia and against the death penalty.
<a href="http://www.prisonradio.org/audio/mumia/ron_hampton.mp3">Ronald
Hampton’s advocacy for Mumia</a>, as Executive Director of the National
Black Police Association (NBPA), is a clear example. As an organization
<a href="http://www.blackpolice.org/nbpapositions.html">the NBPA</a>
protests the death penalty in all circumstances, even when a police
officer has been murdered. These are the only kinds of voices from
members of law enforcement that a truly anti-death penalty movement
should welcome. State-sanctioned murder of <i>anyone</i> is an affront to
an authentic abolitionist movement. Abolitionist movements must resist
the temptations of big money and stand strong against the powerful
pressures by which law enforcement officials today try to co-opt elements
of the abolitionist movement, seeking to preserve the death penalty for
its purposes.<br><br>
Generally, Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EMAJ) opposes any division that
is created between the Mumia movement and the broader effort to abolish
capital punishment. The struggle for Mumia is one with the struggle of
the broader abolitionist movement. EMAJ published in 1998 an essay by
Mark Taylor, one of the signers of this statement, under the title,
<a href="http://emajonline.com/index.php?action=4&content_id=24">
“Mumia and the 3400: Why Stopping Mumia’s Execution Helps End all
Executions in the US.”</a> In this new 2010 statement, EMAJ vigorously
reaffirms the unity of the movement for Mumia <i>and </i>of the broader
abolitionist movement.<br>
1. <i>Every one of the some 3200 men and
women presently on US death row, whatever we think of their guilt or
innocence, or of the nature of their alleged crimes, warrants advocacy
and our best efforts to prevent their execution</i>. Even though various
ones of us may need to concentrate our advocacy in ways that highlight
different figures (say, Mumia, or Troy Davis, or Reggie Clemons, or any
of the many others), this concentration of effort on one should not be
seen as a disparagement of any other death row prisoner’s struggle for
life and justice.<br>
2. <i>Mumia’s struggle and his writings
(rarely about his own case and usually about broader political issues)
has dramatically personalized the issue of the death penalty for
especially youth in urban communities of color, but also in other regions
of the U.S. and internationally</i>. His story of resistance and
political struggle has caught the imagination of many and so brought new
voices into the struggle against the death penalty. This was dramatically
evident in the April 2010 gathering at the EMAJ event at Barnard College
(Columbia University), where a lecture hall was packed out with more than
500 people, mostly young people of all backgrounds, to hear not only a
“phone-in” from Mumia, but also discussions by Cornel West, Vijay
Prashad, and film-maker Jamal Joseph about the importance of Mumia’s case
and struggle.<br>
3. <i>Mumia’s arrest, conviction, and
continual denial of appeals crystallizes and distills – thus makes more
readily apparent – the plagues at work in maintaining our broken death
penalty system:</i> racial bias in judges and juror selection, inadequate
legal counsel, lack of funds for investigations for defendants, police
corruption and prosecutorial misconduct. Thus, Mumia’s case can be seen
as a kind of primer of how the death penalty fails to work justice, and
on how the larger systems of U.S. mass incarceration, policing and
prosecutorial procedures are broken, dysfunctional, and unjust.<br>
4. <i>Mumia’s struggle dramatically
exhibits the agency of death row prisoners themselves in waging their
struggle</i>. Mumia’s death row cell in the prison system is an
organizing site within the system. However necessary our efforts are from
“the outside,” Mumia’s trenchant voice inside death row confirms that the
abolitionist movement is not just a condescending or paternalistic act of
concern of outsiders “for,” or “for the sake of,” those on death row.
Recognizing Mumia is one way to recognize the agency of those in struggle
on death row. His voice, as a <i>voice within</i>,<i> </i>is crucial to
our abolitionist movement’s authenticity.<br>
5. <i>Mumia’s mode of struggle
enables those in the abolitionist movement to keep the struggle against
the US death penalty as part of a larger political struggle, in which
other issues are always at play in our struggle to end capital
punishment</i>. We will not abolish the death penalty, and keep it
abolished, if we cannot articulate the broader issues of power - class
domination, environmental destruction, transnational globalization,
torture at home and abroad, militarist imperialism, and neocolonialism –
all being issues that Abu-Jamal has addressed in relation to capital
punishment and mass incarceration.<br>
6. Although there is a temptation in some
quarters to make of Mumia an icon, just a “cool guy” mentioned in the
<i>Boondocks </i>cartoon strip, Hip Hop magazines, rock concerts, and in
films of different sorts – <i>the lifting of Mumia’s struggle to the
level of a media spectacle can be an advantage to the abolitionist
movement. </i>It enables us to engage the media, not only with Mumia’s
struggle but also with broader efforts to end the death penalty, block
police brutality, and expose the corruptions of racialized power at every
level. One of the reasons political officials of the establishment are so
keenly opposed to Mumia is precisely because he has this capacity to
ignite media attention, nationally and internationally. We should welcome
this and use it.<br>
<i>7. Finally, the Mumia movement positions
resistance to the death penalty around the U.S. national shrine center in
Philadelphia. This places debate about capital punishment (the
state-sanctioned murder of citizens) in a city that is the very symbolic
heart of Americans’ self-understanding of their nation and its history.
</i>The Mumia movement – those of us in it as well as Mumia’s recordings
and writings – is not silent about the general problem of
state-sanctioned killing as part of the very meaning of “America” and its
history. The persistence of the death penalty is, at least in part, due
to the nation’s dependence on policies of war and killing, policies that
date from the devastation of Indian peoples and slave populations, to the
colonization of, and war against, Asian, Arab, African and Latin American
countries, up to the often deadly and disheartening discrimination meted
out against immigrants from these lands in our midst today.<br><br>
The focus of Mumia’s struggle in Philadelphia, then, dramatizes how
central the commitment to state-sanctioned killing is to the forging and
maintenance of this nation. It has always been appropriate, then, that
the festivals of July 4<sup>th</sup> celebration in Philadelphia are
routinely matched by a smaller and fledgling, but vigorous, counter-march
for Mumia and as critique of every death-dealing policy of the U.S. -
whether applied in the killing fields of indigenous peoples lands, in the
desserts of Iraq, or the mountainous ravines of the Afghan/Pakistani
border.<br><br>
Let there be no more division between the advocates of a general
abolition of the death penalty, and the advocates in the movement for
Abu-Jamal. As Educators, in Pennsylvania, across the U.S. and the world,
we reassert our firm opposition to the death penalty in the U.S., <i>and
thus especially</i> to the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.<br><br>
<b>From the Coordinators of <i>Educators for Mumia
Abu-Jamal:</i> <br><br>
Tameka Cage Johanna
Fernandez Mark Lewis Taylor<br><br>
<br>
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