The story that the rapper Common has been invited to the White House has become an Internet source of controversy for days now due to his praise for a cop killer who is no run-of-the-mill cop killer:
While even casual hip-hop fans wouldn’t characterize him as a controversial rapper, Common found himself under the microscope after First Lady Michelle Obama invited him to the White House for an arts event. In question: the lyrics to “A Song for Assata,” about convicted cop-killer and former Black Panther Assata Shakur….The outrage centers on “A Song for Assata” lyrics like “Your power and pride is beautiful. May God bless your soul.” Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, was convicted for the 1973 slaying of Trooper Werner Foerster on the New Jersey Turnpike. She escaped prison in 1979, and is living in asylum in Cuba.
One of those suspected of involvement in Chesimard’s jailbreak was Susan Rosenberg, a member of the Weather Underground—the same American terrorist organization in which Barack Obama’s Chicago colleague Bill Ayers was heavily involved—and the awardee of a mystifying Bill Clinton pardon in 2001. In the May COMMENTARY, George Russell offers a remarkable and infuriating examination of Susan Rosenberg’s recent book, An American Radical, that suggests why the world needs to know why the kind of ignorant praise offered by Common for Chesimard needs to be condemned:
An American Radical…is part of a PR assembly line intended to free more of Rosenberg’s jailed terrorist peers, whom she names as political prisoners still trapped in the belly of the American beast. They include well-known poster children of political victimhood such as Leonard Pelletier, serving life for the murder of two FBI agents at Wounded Knee; Mumia al-Jamal, on death row for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer; and Weather Underground member David Gilbert, still imprisoned for his role in the Rockland County Brink’s robbery.
