Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Andrew Walden: Oakland's Unholy Alliance

Andrew Walden

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

8/7/2007

Islamists in Oakland have been waging a campaign of intimidation and violence to carve out a section of the "progressive" city that conforms to Islamic law -- and the far-Left municipal leadership has looked the other way. It appears, however, they have finally gone too far.

Last Friday, August 3, Oakland police arrested figures associated with “Your Black Muslim Bakery”. In pre-dawn raids, Oakland Police SWAT team searched the bakery and three related locations finding several weapons and placing seven Muslims under arrest. They quickly recovered guns they believed to be the murder weapon used to kill Chauncey Bailey, Editor of the Oakland Post. Police say a 19-year-old bakery handyman named Devaughndre Broussard confessed, stating, "I am a good soldier."

The raids came just hours after Bailey, 57, was gunned down in broad daylight at a busy downtown Oakland intersection as he walked to work. Preparing an article for the Post, a black community weekly, Bailey had been investigating charges that the Muslims were involved in several recent Oakland murders.

Among the arrested was Yusef Bey IV, son of bakery founder, Yusef Bey. The other five arrested were not initially named. Police are still searching for two individuals who they also declined to name.

Shamir Yusuf Bey speaking in front of the bakery August 4 said: "This is not a reflection of Dr. Yusuf Bey." The organization's members all take the last name Bey. Explained Shamir Bey: "We are all sons of Dr. Yusuf Bey. He has taught us morals; he has taught us how to be advocates in our community."

Shamir Bey is correct about the source of his ‘morals.’ The elder Yusuf Bey died of cancer in 2003 awaiting court hearing on charges of rape, sodomy, and lewd acts with a child stemming from a 1992 case involving an impregnated 13 year old girl. Like the “prophet” Mohammed, Yusuf Bey was reputed to have fathered as many as 50 children–many by underage girls.

The bakery briefly made national news in November 2005, when members attacked two Oakland liquor stores, smashing bottles and demanding that the owners stop selling liquor. This follows a pattern established by the Taliban and other Islamist movements which form religious police squads for the “Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue.”

Bay Area leftists responded by saying, “Liquor stores are a blatant symbol of racism in America.” Oakland’s then-Mayor Jerry Brown gently criticized the attacks pointing out that, “not all liquor store owners should be tarred by the bad ones." According to the Oakland Tribune, “The clerk on duty (at the New York Market on San Pablo Ave) Sunday night was reported missing early Monday afternoon. He was found around 2 p.m., locked inside the trunk of a car in a supermarket parking lot in El Cerrito.”

Threatening and trashing local businesses wasn’t the only activity overlooked by the Politically Correct Oakland authorities operating under Mayor Brown’s replacement, open socialist Ron Dellums. After the murder of Chauncey Bailey, the New York Times reported August 3:

Oakland police officials said they suspected that the men were part of a group operating “a very violent criminal enterprise” out of a neighborhood bakery….

The police said the raid came after a lengthy investigation of other crimes, including two kidnappings on a single day in May, and two killings in July that occurred in the same north Oakland neighborhood where the bakery is located. The police had connected those crimes and put the bakery under surveillance before Mr. Bailey was killed.

“During our investigation, Chauncey Bailey was murdered, and it turns out that the evidence in that case also linked the same individuals we were looking at in the other two prior murders to that case,” said Lt. Ersie Joyner of the Oakland Police Department.

Asked whether there were any regrets about not moving faster to arrest the suspects before Mr. Bailey was killed, Assistant Chief Howard Jordan said that the Oakland Police Department’s resources were “very thin” and that the long-term investigation involved the cooperation of neighboring departments.

“Today was the best day we had, that we could have done this with the coordination of our allied agencies,” Mr. Jordan said. “We weren’t just kind of waiting around.”

Mr. Jordan said it was “very disheartening” to hear about Mr. Bailey’s killing, “and it was particularly disheartening to know it was connected to our investigation.”

Lieutenant Joyner said that many residents of the neighborhood surrounding the bakery had been afraid of the Muslim group, whose members sometimes shot automatic rifles in the air in a show of intimidation. Other members of the group, the police said, flaunted their defiance of outstanding warrants on assault and gun charges.

The incident that prompted the investigation, Lieutenant Joyner said, occurred last November. The police suspect that members of the group shot up a local car; no one was injured. The gun used in that shooting was linked to the recent killings, the police said.

In spite of its lengthy criminal ties, “Your Black Muslim Bakery” was able to establish retail locations at Oakland International Airport and the Oakland Coliseum. While they allegedly murdered Oakland residents, they sold “natural,” “reinvigorating” baked products through several Bay Area health food stores.

Journalist Adrian Morgan explains the origins of the group:

When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, Nation of Islam members in California continued under one of the NoI's alternative names - the Black Muslims. These were led by Yusuf Bey, who typified the sort of person who led the NoI in its heyday, an entrepreneur who wanted to be a politician, with a decidedly sinister side.

While the Nation of Islam was riven into factions, following the 1975 death of Elijah Muhammad, Yusuf Bey, a captain of the group, negotiated a meeting in 1979 between Farrakhan and Silis Muhammad, leader of a breakaway faction. When Farrakhan revived the NoI in 1981, Yusuf Bey was not a part of the movement.

Born Joseph H. Stevens in Greeneville, Texas, in 1935, Bey moved with his parents to Oakland at the age of 5. He joined the US Air Force at age 17, and after four years he was honorably discharged. A qualified cosmetologist, Bey ran beauty salons in Oakland Santa Barbara, before opening a bakery in Santa Barbara in 1968 which later became "Your Black Muslim Bakery". He became involved with the Nation of Islam in 1964, and in 1971 moved his bakery to the East Bay. The bakery sold produce free of artificial colorants, with no refined sugar, fats or preservatives.

Bey had a weekly cable show called True Solutions, a platform for Elijah Muhammad's brand of Islam. He even ran for the position of Mayor of Oakland. He died on September 30, 2003, of colon cancer, having established an empire running housing, a school, a security firm and retail businesses, including Your Black Muslim Bakery. At the time of his death, he was engaged in a legal battle with a woman who claimed he had first raped her in 1982 when she was 13. She claimed she had been sexually abused by Yusuf Bey since the age of 10.

As members of Bey's family vied for the position of successor, violence broke out. On February 27, 2004 Waajid Aljawwaad Bey, president and CEO of the bakery, vanished. His rotting corpse was later found in a shallow grave in the Oakland Hills. In June 2005, Bey's adopted son John was wounded by a gunman in an ambush, and on October 25, Yusuf's 24-year old son Antar Bey was shot dead at a gas station. Nineteen-year old Yusuf Bey IV appeared to have taken over the leadership - he was indicted for smashing up Muslim-owned liquor stores in Oakland, events which happened a month after Antar Bey was killed. One store was torched, and an employee was locked in the trunk of a car. The tactic of wrecking premises had been employed under the leadership of Bey senior - in 1994 a rival laundry had been trashed by Black Muslims.

Why is this group still in business? It is not because the accused child-molester Bey was popular, he won only 5 percent of the vote in his 1994 run for Oakland mayor. Politically Correct Bay Area authorities have a long history of coddling gangsters who attach political rhetoric to their crimes. Publicly and openly.

A 2002 article by Chris Thompson in the East Bay Express explained criminal allegations against “Your Black Muslim Bakery” including the March 4, 1994, kidnapping, torture and extortion of Nigerian immigrant Olasunkanmi Onipede over a real estate deal with a Bakery associate. Presiding over the torture and extortion was, “Nedir Bey, the public face of Oakland's most prominent Black Muslim organization, the man who lobbies the City Council, orchestrates media events, and runs interference for the group's elusive leader….”

As the Express explained: “A group of up to six soldiers in the Black Muslim organization, led by a senior member of the Bey family, allegedly tortured two men for up to four hours – and were allegedly transporting him under armed escort when police arrived. When Oakland police tried to arrest the men involved in this incident, thirty Black Muslims mounted an organized assault on the officers – and the leader allegedly rallied his troops by calling for the death of white cops.”
These were not the only criminal accusations against Bey associates pointed out by the Express. “While acting as managers of a North Oakland apartment complex, four Black Muslims allegedly beat a tenant unconscious during an argument about his daughter.” Also, “prominent family member Nedir Bey has been accused of stalking his estranged lover, threatening to hurt her or steal their children.”

Al-Taqiyyah is a Muslim doctrine which allows Muslims to do anything as long as it furthers the power of Islam. The elder Bey built a multi-million dollar property and business empire following these methods. But after his death, his amoral followers’ narcissistic impulses began pulling the empire apart. As the Express explained:

According to court records, (Oakland drug dealer Lavelle) Stewart looked in his car and noticed that someone had stolen $1,200 worth of drugs. Turning on the crowd (outside the Omni Nightclub), he said he shouted, "One of you motherfuckers know what happened to my weed.

We've been out here enjoying ourselves all day, and my shit didn't just come up missing like this." As (Akbar) Bey and his friends began arguing, Stewart said, "It's like this," pulled a .357 "bulldog" Magnum from his waistband, and shot Bey four times. Two bullets smashed his jaw and passed through his brain, and two rounds hit him in the chest. Stewart was sentenced to sixty years in prison. According to court records, the pathologist concluded that Akbar Bey was high on heroin or morphine at the time of his death.

Even after decades of murder and mayhem, pseudo-intellectual academic frauds can still make up conspiracy theories and excuses. Quoted by AP August 4, California State University–East Bay professor Benjamin Bowser claims:

The group has deep roots in Oakland's life and politics, and for decades it played a positive role in Oakland's black community, said Cal State East Bay professor Benjamin Bowser, a sociologist who has chronicled the city's history.

The group served as an example of upward economic mobility in an impoverished community, and its members tried to serve as a buffer against the rising drug trade, Bowser said. The bakery has also long provided ex-convicts with one of the few places they could work after being released from prison.

"The Black Muslims along with the Black Panthers were instrumental in really keeping the widespread mass marketing of drugs out of east and west Oakland in the late 1960s, until the government focused on taking the Panthers out," Bowser said.

Ironically Bowser is listed as a “Journalists’ Resource” by the Association of American University Presses.

Most leftists are too effete to physically enforce their own ideology. This is why they need thugs to do it for them. Substantial portions of Hillary Clinton’s 1969 senior thesis are about the benefits of “test(ing) whether the mechanisms of (Chicago) gang structures could not assist in shifting attitudes toward productive adult citizenship.” (p. 34.) Hillary’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, spent years working with Al Capone’s Chicago gang.

It was not a problem when the victims were other members of the Bey group or private citizens in Oakland, but with the murder of Chauncey Bailey, the thugs made the mistake of taking out one of the elite – a journalist. Suddenly the “very thin” Oakland police find themselves permitted to make multiple arrests and shut down the bakery. It is not yet clear whether Oakland authorities will actually finish the job and dismantle the Islamist monster which they have for years cultivated in their midst. But a line has been crossed. With the murder of Chauncey Bailey, the Islamists have killed one of the cultural elite.

The Express asks: “Why has it taken so long for all these allegations, the torture and rapes and beatings, to come before the public? Why has Bey commanded the respect and admiration of so many people – and why were so many civic leaders eager to call him friend? Countless Oakland leaders have offered the Bey family their services. It's time for them to answer for it.”

That was written five years ago.

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