DANIEL MCCARTHY: Assata Shakur And Other Parents Of Political Violence

As the Trump administration takes on the latest wave of left-wing violence, an obituary reminds us what happens when political killers get away with their crimes.

The law never caught up with Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur.

She died last Thursday, age 78, an honored guest of Cuba’s Communist regime — and honored, disgracefully, by tenured radicals in America’s universities, too.

Professors have placed the convicted murderer on lists of “African American heroes” and present her as a model for activism.

Stanford University’s dean of students, Mona Hicks, quoted a “loving refrain from Assata Shakur” in a campus email at the time of the George Floyd riots:

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’”

That language wasn’t metaphorical — when Shakur said fight, it was a call to violence.

She wasn’t just an activist. She was a terrorist, a self-styled “revolutionary” of the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist radical group in the 1970s.

Revolution for them meant robbing banks, planting bombs and killing cops.

Shakur was already on the run from the law when she and two other BLA members were pulled over by New Jersey state troopers in 1973.

She and her associates shot at the officers — killing one and wounding another, while Shakur took a few bullets herself and one of her fellow radicals died.

Police took her into custody, but she became a cause celebre with progressives — who tried to call her a political prisoner — and in 1979 a BLA offshoot called “The Family” sprang her from prison.