More Mumia Madness in Paris

Der Spiegel reports on the decision of French communists to name a street in suburban Paris after convicted Philadelphia cop killer, Wesley Cook, AKA Mumia Abu-Jamal. Led by Rick Santorum, many Pennsylvanians are understandably upset by the gesture, but Paris authorities are defiant.

Here's a description of Wesley's street:

a single-lane, freshly paved street between an empty low-income housing building and a warehouse slated for demolition.

It's in an area of crumbling facades, construction cranes and lots covered in wild plant growth -- a typical example of a neighborhood in need of urban renewal in the outlying Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. Its 95,000 residents are mosly black and arab immigrants for Africa.

Sounds appropriate.

To the loons of the left Cook's conviction and imprisonment symbolizes and provides an opportunity to demonstate against so many of the things they love to hate.

With so many issues at stake -- race, the death penalty, a faulty trial, America -- it comes as no surprise that the case has attracted so much attention at home and abroad. Some US civil rights activists, opponents of globalization and old-school leftists revere Abu-Jamal as a "voice of the voiceless" and see his case as evidence of the excesses of a racist judicial system.

Read about it here.

Apparently the decision to rename the street was in response to Rick Santorum's call, inspired by earlier "free Mumia" protests, for a boycott on French products.

The image keeps recurring in my mind of small children taunting each other on a playground.

Sigh!

Pictured: a 2000 Mumia rally in Paris.