Paris awards honorary citizenship to activist (Mumia Abu-Jamal) on death row in US

Hindustan Times Agence France-Presse ^ | Paris, October 4 | Agence France-Presse

[dennisw]

Paris awards honorary citizenship to activist on death row in US Agence France-Presse Paris, October 4

The city of Paris on Saturday awarded honorary citizenship to a celebrated US black activist on the death row.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of a white Philadelphia policeman.

It is the first time Paris has bestowed the honour since Pablo Picasso was made honorary citizen in 1971, Socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe told an audience of 200 people, taking the occasion to attack the "barbarity" of the death penalty.

Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther civil rights activist and journalist who has maintained his innocence, had his death sentence overturned in December of 2001 but that decision is currently on appeal.

In attacking the "barbarity called the death penalty", the mayor said, "as long as there is a place on this planet where one can be killed in the name of the community, we haven't finished our work."

Raising his fist in a sign of solidarity, Delanoe then shouted "Mumia is a Parisian!" as the crowd of mostly-leftist activists cheered and applauded.

Black activist Angela Davis, a former member of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, hailed the "profound sense of humanity" of Abu-Jamal, attacking American "unilateralism" and racist attacks against immigrants.

The movement to free Abu-Jamal "takes on a new sense in 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," Davis, a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, said.

Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death 21 years ago for the murder of Daniel Faulkner, has always insisted he was innocent, and scores of movements and organizations have sprung up around the world in his defense.

His opponents view him as an unrepentant murderer.

His case has provoked particularly vivid debate in France, which abolished the death penalty in 1981. French school children are required to study the case as part of their education.

[SAMWolf]

[Brian Allen]

France: The land and people whose only-ever contribution to the advancement of Judeo-Christian [Human] Civilization was their late-twentieth-century cessation of beheading as a means of executing their "judicially" condemned.

The land and people whose post-colonial surrogates continue to murder millions throughout Africa, Asia and the Mid-East.

The land of pimps and sluts who supply cruise-missile engines to Human History's most prolific ever mass-murderer and most prolific ever child rapist, the predatory pedophile Mao Tze Tung's and to that Peking-based manifestation of evil's self-perpetuating mass-murdering mandarin wannabe gangster bastard heirs and successors and build nuclear reactors for tyrants, despots and others among the world's anti-Semitic, psychopathologically-hesperophobic mass murderers.

Psychopathologically-hesperophobic, anti-Semitic, cheese eating surrender-monkeys.

Squalid-socialist-statist bastards.

Without honor!

[I'm done, for now]