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But Abu-Jamal's former prison visitor, Philip Bloch of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, says he finally revealed the alleged confession out of "disgust" with the militant idiocy of Abu-Jamal's supporters. The heartsick do-gooder, who's now a substitute teacher, says he was driven to honesty, after years of keeping the conversation secret, by the way Abu-Jamal's supporters have tormented Faulkner's widow, Maureen, for the crime of believing the Pennsylvania prisoner was correctly convicted.

I know how Bloch feels. The Mumia cult sickens me like little else in American politics today. For the white left, it's Black Panther worship all over again, with even less to worship. At least the Panthers, for all their violence and corruption, purported to be about economic uplift and breakfast programs for children and black self-determination in a city, Oakland, Calif., run by a white Republican machine left over from the 1940s. Abu-Jamal has done little but run a one-man self-promotion machine from prison.

All these years after the Panthers self-destructed, masochistic white leftists still seem to need a big black avenger to act out their fantasies of rebellion against the system. For the most part, Mumia madness seems a white thing -- you don't get much whiter than Evergreen College up in Olympia, Wash., where Abu-Jamal delivered a controversial recorded commencement address. (Sample wisdom: "Out of the many here assembled, it is the heart of he or she I seek who looks at a life of vapid materialism, of capitalist excess, and finds it simply intolerable.")

But mixed with the left's prisoner fetish is something even uglier, especially in a movement supposedly devoted to economic justice: a hideous class bias. The telegenic dreadlocked Mumia, with his books and commencement addresses and public radio commentaries, is so much more loveable than, say, Anthony Porter, the scruffy Illinois African-American man with a low IQ who was wrongly locked up on death row until a group of Northwestern students, led by a crusading journalism professor, came up with the evidence that freed him late last year.

Those students, armed less with ideology than curiosity, have helped free three death row prisoners, while Mumia's minions are content with marching in the streets and signing petitions on behalf of their cuddly convict. "He is just beautiful," says author Alice Walker. "He has a lot of light. He reminds me of Nelson Mandela." What an insult to Mandela.

Next page | Millions for Mumia, but not a shred of concern about anything that matters