Before Terrorists Had To Be Imported...

We made do with the homegrown variety

"A Bronx high school teacher is using the words of a convicted cop killer to educate his students.

"Assata," the autobiography of radical fugitive Joanne Chesimard, is serving as a textbook in a 12th-grade social studies class.

The recent furor over the convicted murderer, who goes by the name Assata Shakur, led to her name being stripped from a City College campus center. But teacher Adam Feinberg says the book is a powerful teaching tool - and that he's not convinced Shakur killed New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.

"Assata Shakur never broke any laws. She was trying to send a message to America and trying to help her people, but the FBI pinned her as a cop killer, and as a result, she went to jail for life," says Feinberg, 22, of the High School for Violin and Dance.

Feinberg said he had no problem with the City College sign honoring Shakur and Guillermo Morales, a bomb-builder for a Puerto Rican separatist group.

"I don't think it's wrong to name a center after her, unless she gets a free and fair trial - which I don't think was possible for a member of the Black Panthers in the early 1970s," Feinberg said. "In my mind, she hasn't been proven guilty, and thus she's innocent. That's the law."

But Dave Jones, president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Association, said believing claims of innocence from Shakur is akin to believing a Holocaust denier.

"No wonder why the graduation rate is so low in the Bronx," Jones said. "They're teaching fairy tales."

"There is no way that a person in an educational, moral or American sense can justify this book," he said. "As an American, I do not believe in censorship - but I also do not believe that our public learning institutions should be furthering a terrorist lie."

He also noted that while her book is being used in the Bronx to teach about fighting oppression, Shakur fled the U.S. for Cuba: "The most despotic political entity in the Western Hemisphere - that's where she finds refuge."

Shakur's autobiography has clearly made an impression on Feinberg's students. Several yesterday defended both the book and the college sign.

"I think it was wrong for the school to be forced to take down the sign and change the name. Assata is not a bad person," said Mandy, one of Feinberg's students. "In the foreword of the book, she says she did not kill the cop, and I believe her."

Another student, Angie, called Shakur's story part of American history: "Assata is just one story about how there is a lot of racism in the world," she said. "Blacks and Puerto Ricans are affected by it."

As of yesterday, the campus center sign was gone.

City College student Sergey Kadinsky, 22, who sparked the controversy by questioning the sign's propriety, said he was pleasantly surprised. "The school acted correctly and did the right thing for the entire community."

This is what slays me about the intelligentsia NYC Jew. Forgetting their heritage and spitting upon present day reality, they champion all sorts of animals in the quest to be "fair and non-judgmental". The same sort who actually oppose Israel in favor of Palestinian Homeland nonsense, and never met a killer they didn't like.