Shock is the natural reaction to Brooklyn City Councilman Charles Barron’s endorsement of a remark made by his chief of staff calling for the “assassination” of a fellow council member last week.

That an elected official in America, not to mention a member of the New York City Council, one of whose members was actually assassinated in 2003, would endorse the murder of one of his colleagues, disturbs our conception of representative democracy. As heated as our political culture might get in America, we are centuries away from the era of Burr and Hamilton. Ours is no longer the “honor culture” in which killing one’s opponent is acceptable.

Yet, given that one of Mr. Barron’s ideological heroes is the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, shock is not the appropriate response to this situation. Let’s make one thing clear. Not even a casual suggestion of murder is acceptable. But it is predictable. That’s what you see when you conduct a review of Mr. Barron’s past associations with a murderous tyrant.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Barron introduced a proposal to rename a Brooklyn street after the late Sonny Carson, a poor man’s Al Sharpton who led boycotts against Korean-American owned grocery stores and had infamously declared himself “anti-white.” But when support from the Queens councilman, Leroy Comrie, one of the several minority council members, abstained, the proposal died.

In reaction, Mr. Barron’s chief of staff, Viola Plummer, said of Mr. Comrie: “If it takes an assassination of his ass, he will not be borough president of the borough in which I live.”

One would think that Mr. Barron would have rebuked his subordinate’s ranting. But Mr. Barron treated Ms. Pummer’s remark as a joke, and when asked if he thought her remarks were appropriate, replied, “Absolutely.”

It is in light of Mr. Barron’s light-hearted attitude towards the fatwa against a colleague that makes his history with Mr. Mugabe relevant. In 2002, two years after he began seizing white farms, a policy directly responsible for his country’s current mass starvation and 3,700% inflation rate, Mr. Mugabe invited a group of New York City councilors on a “fact-finding” trip to Zimbabwe. “We are taking this as a fact-finding mission to get informed about the land issue there,” Mr. Barron, the group’s leader, told the New York Post. Isolated by the international community and condemned by human rights groups, Mr. Mugabe was prescient in his belief that he could count on the likes of Mr. Barron, a former Black Panther, to offer him succor.

Unfortunately for Mr. Barron and his allies on the council, the trip was cancelled because Mr. Mugabe “would not have been able to meet with us if we had gone because his schedule had to be changed.” It is unclear what the tyrant was so busy doing at the time, but Mr. Barron made sure that Mr. Mugabe was given a warm welcome when the dictator visited New York the following month for — what else? — a United Nations conference.

Mr. Barron, along with other members of the City Council’s Black, Hispanic, and Asian caucus, held a reception for Mr. Mugabe in City Hall. Mr. Mugabe, due to travel restrictions placed on him and his cronies by the European Union and America, is unable to venture far from the United Nations.

Standing in the democratic chamber beside a statue of Thomas Jefferson, and with 10 council members seated behind him, the aging Marxist revolutionary told his audience that “the liberation struggle continues today” amid cries of “Tell it” and “That’s right.” Mr. Barron, dressed in a Nehru jacket, heaped praise on Mr. Mugabe, saying that he is a, “dynamic, bold African man willing to stand up to the world for his people.”

His “people” — at least the ones I met in Zimbabwe last August, some of whom were digging for rats to eat a mere eight miles from Mr. Mugabe’s presidential mansion in Harare — do not seem to have the same illusions about the “struggle” as does Mr. Barron. Also in 2002, according to Amnesty International, Mr. Mugabe’s regime killed 57 people in politically motivated murders.

It is not only rhetorical violence that Mr. Barron has learnt from Mugabe, but expropriation as well. Last week, Mr. Barron — along with other black activists — commandeered Linden Park in Brooklyn and posted signs along fences declaring that it would henceforth be known as “Sonny Abubadika Carson Park.” Never mind the rule of law, Mr. Barron announced to those assembled that, “This is official because I am an official.”

The situation in Zimbabwe has deteriorated tremendously since the time Mr. Barron played host to Mr. Mugabe. Since then, Mr. Barron has been quiet about the country’s grave humanitarian crisis. But it is worth asking Mr. Barron how he now feels about the man he welcomed to New York just five years ago.

Mr. Kirchick, who reported from Zimbabwe last year, is assistant to the editor in chief of the New Republic.