Joanne Chesimard — a/k/a Assata Shakur — died in Cuba over the weekend. Among many other such stories, Bryan Burrough recalls Chesimard’s case in his 2015 book Days of Rage: American’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. It’s an outstanding book that seems to me more timely than ever and Chesimard’s story is one of the most sickening he tells in the book. At the moment, I need to borrow from an old Michelle Malkin column to get her story straight.
A New Jersey jury convicted Chesimard on first-degree murder, assault and other charges in the 1973 traffic stop execution of state trooper Werner Foerster and wounding of trooper James Harper. She received a life (plus 30 years) sentence. Instead of serving behind bars, however, Shakur led the pampered life of a “political fugitive” in Communist Cuba after her radical Black Liberation Army buddies busted her out of prison. The late Fidel Castro’s regime provided the fugitive murderer and social justice vigilante an apartment, stipends, books and funding for graduate school.
Chesimard was only one of approximately 70 fugitives from American justice when Barack Obama moved to normalize relations with Cuba, but she was one who had made the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list.
I’m pretty sure Obama didn’t bring up her case when he did the wave at the baseball game he attended with his buddy Fidel in Havana. However, Castro was a former pitcher. He might have given Obama a tip or two about how not to throw a baseball like a girl.
Obama never publicly celebrated Chesimard. Leave it to the American mainstream media. The Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson now provides “A Definitive Guide to Media Coverage of Cop Killer Assata Shakur’s Death.” Subhead: “Meet the ‘tireless battler against racial oppression’ who ‘found refuge’ in Cuba.”
