[col. writ. 4/18/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal     The incipient, yet growing protests at Philadelphia’s Temple University around the governance of its highly-prized African Studies Dept. is not about academic freedom, nor about departmental regulations and proper protocol, although it has been couched in such terms.   It’s about something far more fundamental.   It’s about power. The power of inst...

  [col. writ. 4/15/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   When we speak of ‘freedom of the press’, one of the promises of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment, we usually do so with an air of self-praise and self-applause. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the greatest observers of America, saw this feature of this nation, and criticized it in his classic 1835 work, Democracy in America.   But the Constitution spea...

  [col. writ. 4/10/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   It is one of the ironies of history that the descendants of the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, subjected to the bitter hatreds and repression of the Nazis, have established an entire sea of the oppressed and impoverished on their periphery: the open-air prison ghettoes of Palestine: Gaza and the West Bank.   There, in full view of the world, is...

  [col. writ. 4/12/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal     The North Korean military announce a series of missile tests, implicitly suggesting some will (may) be nuclear.   The U.S. press dusts of its red banner headlines and reporters pose as armchair psychiatrists who dutifully diagnose North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-Un, as crazy.   Sound familiar?   Over a decade ago, the same forces deemed Iraq’s p...

  [col. writ. 4/14/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not big on my birthday. Many years, I forget it entirely. So, don’t expect a big birthday speech.   But, every so often, I think of a birthday that is hard to forget.   It’s April 24th, 1996, when the President of the United States signed into law an act known as the AEDPA (or Anti-terrorism Effective Death Penalty ...

  [col. writ. 4/10/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   The issue of immigration is boiling hot in America.   Every potential presidential candidate has an opinion; and, if necessary, will find another one if s/he thinks it can get him/her a few more Latino votes. But, ultimately, too many politicians are locked into US fear and hatred of Mexicans – so the issue is in a stalemate.   It is ironic that most...

  [col. writ. 4/7/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   It would be easy, considering American history, to describe this country as ‘warlike’.   And while such a description would be technically correct, it would be misleading, for it ignores the social forces which drive men to war.   For chief among those forces is the media, as it provides the narrative, which focuses the rationale for war. Secondarily ...

  [col. writ. 3/20/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   If my prison source is correct, Black liberation fighter, imprisoned intellectual, historian and now book author, Russell ‘Maroon” Shoatz, has been transferred from the dungeons of SCI Greene – and he is in the ‘hole’ of SCI Mahanoy in Southeastern Pennsylvania.   Maroon, who has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the longest –held-in-the-‘hole...

  [col. writ. 3/22/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal   There is something so wonderful and terrible about the spectacle of U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama on the world’s stage.   Wonderful, as he is a Black man at the very pinnacle of political power; terrible, too, in that his immense talents are put at the service of the Empire.   When he speaks in an eloquence so sorely lacking from his predecesso...

  [col. writ. 3/27/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal The brilliant light of a Nigerian master-writer has gone out, and the world is poorer for it. Chinua Achebe, whose stunning novel, Things Fall Apart, opened the doorway to the voices traditional, ancestral Africa, has returned to the Essence after a long life of literature, politics, scholarship and strife.   His first novel told the searing tale of ...