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Brutality by the BayWhy did the Oakland police do so little about Your Black Muslim Bakery's thuggery?

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 1:01 PM ET
Yusuf Bey IV. Click image to expand.

Here is the situation regarding the enterprise known as Your Black Muslim Bakery, located on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Calif. Its founder, a man named Yusuf Bey, was arrested in 2002 and charged with forcing an underage girl to have sex. Subsequent investigation suggested that he had a long history of rape and abuse of his followers and had by this means fathered numerous children out of wedlock. Bey died in September 2003 before his case could come to trial. His son Yusuf Bey IV has since been arrested twice, first on suspicion of leading a gang that had trashed two Oakland liquor stores and intimidated their owners, and second (and perhaps less Islamically) for running over a San Francisco bouncer with his car. Nedir Bey, one of Yusuf Bey's "spiritually adopted" sons, is also alleged to have beaten a possible business rival with a flashlight, while another member of the gang tortured the victim with a heated knife.

These and several other crimes of violence were investigated by the East Bay Express, a local community weekly. Reporter Chris Thompson was subjected to threats and to aggressive stalking, and, for his own safety, worked in a different county for several months after his series about YBMB ran. The paper's editor, Stephen Buel, has been quoted as saying that his office and staff were deluged with threats and haunted by unpleasant characters and that the threats indicated that they originated with Your Black Muslim Bakery. "We have several threats left on voice mail that we obviously had a record of. One of the threats featured a taped quotation of a speech from Yusuf Bey the elder," said Buel. At a certain point, Buel admits, it became more trouble than it was worth to write about YBMB.

Oakland is a city fairly hardened to criminal violence, but beginning last December, there was what the papers like to call a "spree." In that month, a car was raked with bullets from several weapons. In May, two people were kidnapped and one was robbed and tortured. In July, two citizens were murdered by gunshots in the northern part of the city. The bullets all appear, according to the police, to come from the same source, which by now you may have guessed. The late Herb Caen, imperishable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, used to refer humorously to "Baghdad by the Bay," but by that he meant Beach Blanket Babylon and not this gruesome horror show.

Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)

My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums—who I was startled to find was still alive—would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless. Residents have been complaining for a long time about the atmosphere of hatred and violence—and about what some have called the YBMB's attempt to "cleanse" the neighborhood, either of godless liquor stores on the model of jihadism or simply of business rivals and journalistic critics. What were the police doing all this time, and why did Chauncey Bailey have to be murdered before they could be moved to act? Perhaps they were doing what they do best: confiscating marijuana and rousting whores so as to painlessly improve the crime statistics. I called Bob Valladon, the extremely rude and graceless head of the Oakland police union, but I didn't even get to put my question before receiving a large flea in my ear. Other California law-enforcement officials were adamant in refusing to be quoted in any way. I can't say I blame them: Thousands of their voters and citizens are living in Third World conditions of fear, with a "no-snitch" policy openly enforced at gunpoint, and they cannot be troubled to do anything about it.

This official apathy—amounting to collusion—is undergirded by a culture that cringingly insists on "respect" for any organization, however depraved, that can masquerade as "faith-based." If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Photograph of Yusuf Bey IV by Dan Rosenstrauch/AP Photo.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Would you rather the cops had raided before they had a case, thereby facilitating the charges being thrown out of criminal court? Now who's being irrational about Muslims?

I can't see how you're advocating anything less than rounding up people based on ethnicity or religion and the fact that other's of the same ethnicity/religion have done some very bad things. I thought that WW2 had taught us that lesson, more than any of the other lessons that the Bush administration likes to take from WW2. But apparently this only applies now to Israel and your friends, the Kurds.

--TheChemist

(To reply, click here.)

Hitchens makes the connection to Sharia law with the YBMB's attacking of liquor stores. Ok, that may have technically been under the auspices of Sharia law, but it seems to me that the real motivations would be much like those that lead to the other accounts of rape\murder\extortion: petty neighborhood thuggery.

You might argue that thuggery is just another form of religious extremism, and that this may as well have been a front for suicide bombers instead of mafiosos. Well there is an important difference - the root cause. Religious extremism as we have become familiar with it grows out of political disaffection and radical ideas of religious justice. Gangsters emerge from broken neighborhoods and lawlessness. This seems to be a case of the latter.

So Hitchens should stick to criticizing the police for acting too late, but instead of blaming it on a laissez-faire approach to religions he should realize that this gang took to long to deal with for the same reasons that hundreds of other criminal organizations in our country still thrive - endemic poverty, dangerous neighborhoods, and the shortcomings of law enforcement.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

The author wants to lump all Muslims together. I know all Muslims are persona non grata lately, but they are not all the same. The author mentions "White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor." Black Muslims have as much to do with Orthodox Islam as white supremacist Christian fringe groups do. Islamists or "Radical Islam" is more in line with mainstream Islam than Black Muslims are. If this group's crimes are being overlooked due to prejudice, I would guess it is because they are black, not because they are Muslim.

--gslape

(To reply, click here.)

Sadly, Oakland is a troubled city with one of the worst violent crime rates in the country. Whether there is some attitude or strategy on the part of the Oakland Police Department that has allowed these problems to worsen I can't say. But I certainly don't believe that anyone was out to protect Your Black Muslim Bakery. Oakland's problems long pre-dated the tenures of both mayor Ron Dellums and Congresswoman Barbara Lee, and it would be unfair to lay the blame at their feet.

As just another example of horrific black-on-black violence in cities like Oakland, this case is part of a social, not a political, nor a religious, problem. And if there's any connection with liberal politics, it's only coincidental that most urban minority communities tend to elect Democrats like Dellums and Lee. If we're going to start drawing sweeping conclusions from the sometimes awkward political alliances that form on the fringes of any mainstream party, it's only fair to include other institutions like the racist, ultra-conservative Christian extremists of Bob Jones University and its allies on the political right.

Like urban crime elsewhere in the country, violent crime in Oakland has recently gotten worse after a previous decade of declining crime rates. Reasons given include things like gangs, drugs, and the easy availability of illegal guns. Despite Hitchens' evident terror at what he seems to see as the inexorable encroachment of "sharia baking" across our nation, from the sound of it, YBMB was essentially just another gang.

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

The important element not to miss in this story is that cities like Oakland and Richmond are asleep at the wheel. Whether in regards to religion or race (or both in this case), the police and city governments are so afraid of offending some self-proclaimed oppressed class that they will not enforce the law. They allow thugs, organized or not, to run these neighborhoods. I know about this all too well, since I spent the first twenty years of my life neck-deep in it.

Hitch is correct about our fear of offending Islam, a theme about which he writes regularly, but he touches on a much larger point here. Our cities, our neighborhoods, and our streets will remain more of a threat than terrorism ever will be unless we get serious , and start cracking down on these criminal elements in a very serious way.

--jimidasprinkla

(To reply, click here.)

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