Assyrian International News Agency
Assyrians Commemorate Martyrs Day Worldwide
Posted GMT 8-8-2007 16:53:33
Los Angeles (AINA) -- Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) commemorated Martyrs Day on August 7th, the official Assyrian memorial holiday. The holiday was observed in cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Toronto, Stockholm, London, Amsterdam and North Iraq.

The Assyrian Martyrs day remembers the victims of genocides and pogroms, including the Turkish Genocide of Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians in World War One, in which 750,000 Assyrians (75%) were killed.

The date August 7th was chosen because in 1933 the newly formed Iraq, having gained its independence from the British just one year earlier, massacred the Assyrians of the village of Simmele and its surroundings in north Iraq, killing 3000 Assyrian men, women and children (account of massacre).

August 8, 2007
U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD, Aug. 7 — Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.

“July was an all-time high,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in an interview, referring to strikes with such devices.

Such bombs, which fire a semi-molten copper slug that can penetrate the armor on a Humvee and are among the deadliest weapons used against American forces, are used almost exclusively by Shiite militants. American intelligence officials have presented evidence that the weapons come from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, although Tehran has repeatedly denied providing lethal assistance to Iraqi groups.

In recent weeks, the American military has focused on mounting operations in sanctuaries used by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group that is predominately made up of Iraqis but has foreign leadership. But, as the information provided by General Odierno shows, Shiite militias remain a major long-term worry.

In focusing on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the American goal is to reduce the number of car bombings and spectacular suicide attacks that have aggravated sectarian tensions, encouraged Shiite retaliation and undermined efforts at political reconciliation.

While the group is seen by the American military as the most serious near-term threat, there are other signs that Shiite militias remain active. According to General Odierno, the day-to-day commander of American troops in Iraq, Shiite militants carried out 73 percent of the attacks that killed or wounded American troops in Baghdad in July.

Though explosively formed penetrators account for a small fraction of roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, they cause a disproportionately large number of casualties.

Of the 69 members of the American-led forces killed in action in July, the lowest toll in months, 23 died as a result of attacks with the devices, according to data supplied by General Odierno’s command. Of the 614 allied troops who were wounded that month, 89 were hit in penetrator attacks.

Penetrator attacks have been a worry for years. In 2005, the United States sent a private diplomatic protest to Tehran complaining that its Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah had been training Iraqi Shiite insurgents in Iran and providing them with bomb-making equipment.

American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran’s border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.

Some critics of Bush administration policy, saying there is no proof that the top echelons of Iran’s government are involved, accuse the White House of exaggerating the role of Iran and Syria to divert attention from its own mistakes.

According to American military data, penetrator attacks accounted for 18 percent of combat deaths of Americans and allied troops in Iraq in the last quarter of 2006. The number of such attacks declined in January, and some American officials thought at that time that this might be a response to their efforts to publicly highlight the allegations of an Iranian role.

But in recent months such attacks have risen steadily.

The July figure is roughly double the number for January. The total for July is also 50 percent higher than in April, when there were 65 penetrator attacks, according to American military officials.

Many of the penetrators faced by American forces are difficult to counter. Because they fire from the side of the road, the militants do not need to dig a hole to plant them, making them well suited for urban use. Because they are set off by a passive infrared sensor, they cannot be thwarted by electronic jamming.

General Odierno said Iran was increasing its support to Shiite militants in Iraq to step up the military pressure on the United States at a time when the Congress is debating whether to withdraw American troops.

“I think it is because the Iranians are surging support to the special groups,” he said, referring to the American name for Iranian-backed cells here. “Over the last three to four months, it has picked up in terms of equipment, training and dollars.”

“I think they want to influence the decision potentially coming up in September,” he added.

General Odierno said Iranians had also provided Shiite groups with 107-millimeter rockets and the launchers for firing them, as well as 122-millimeter mortars.

American forces, he said, recently thwarted an attack at a military base used by forces from the Third Infantry Division. Fifty launchers equipped with rockets were discovered within range of the facility and struck by allied aircraft. Serial numbers taken from the rocket launchers, he said, indicated that they were made in Iran.

Iranian and American diplomats held talks in Baghdad on Monday on security in Iraq. Ryan C. Crocker, the American envoy in Iraq who led the discussions for the United States, said there had been “an escalation, not a de-escalation” of Iran’s support for militias in Iraq since an earlier May meeting.

The Iranians, Mr. Crocker added, maintained their position that they had “absolutely nothing to do with” the attacks.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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McDonald's raising China pay after controversy
Reuters
Tuesday, August 7, 2007; 8:57 AM

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - U.S. fast food giant McDonald's Corp. , facing accusations that it has been breaching China's minimum wage laws, said on Tuesday it would give its Chinese employees their first across-the-board pay rise.

From next month, McDonald's will increase workers' pay to levels 12 to 56 percent above local minimum wages, McDonald's China spokesman George Gu said.

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He declined to be more specific about the rises but said that currently, some workers were paid "in line" with minimum levels.

McDonald's became embroiled in a public controversy in April, when Chinese newspapers reported it was paying some part-timers far below local minimums -- for example, 4 yuan (52 cents) an hour in the big southern city of Guangzhou, or just over half the city's minimum.

China's state-backed All-China Federation of Trade Unions called on McDonald's to adjust its pay and let its workers unionize.

"The wage issue partly helped us accelerate salary adjustments in China," Gu said. "But the main purpose is to let our local employees share the prosperity of McDonald's business."

The company will also introduce more incentive and training programs for its 50,000 staff in China, and aims to have all workers unionize by the end of this year, compared with 80 percent now, he added.

The controversy came at a sensitive time for McDonald's since China's state-backed unions have been stepping up efforts to expand at big foreign companies, and because of rising inflation. Chinese consumer price inflation hit a 33-month high of 4.4 percent in June and is believed to have risen further last month.

The pay rise will not hurt the profitability of McDonald's in China and the company has no near-term plans to increase its food prices, Gu said.

Chinese unions have also criticized the wage policies of Yum! Brands Inc.'s Pizza Hut and KFC, while Wal-Mart Stores Inc. last year let Chinese staff join unions after criticism that it exploited low-paid workers.

McDonald's has over 800 restaurants in China and plans to open 100 more every year.

The Major Diplomatic and Strategic Evolution in Iraq
By George Friedman
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker met Aug. 6 with Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi Qomi and Iraqi National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie. Separately, a committee of Iranian, Iraqi and U.S. officials held its first meeting on Iraqi security, following up on an agreement reached at a July ambassadorial-level meeting.
The U.S. team was headed by Marcie Ries, counselor for political and military affairs at the embassy in Baghdad. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who handles Iraq for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, led the Iranian team. A U.S. Embassy spokesman described the talks as "frank and serious," saying they "focused, as agreed, on security problems in Iraq." Generally, "frank and serious" means nasty, though they probably did get down to the heart of the matter. The participants agreed to hold a second meeting, which means this one didn't blow up.
Longtime Stratfor readers will recall that we have been tracing these Iranian-American talks from the back-channel negotiations to the high-level publicly announced talks, and now to this working group on security. A multilateral regional meeting on Iraq's future was held March 10 in Baghdad, followed by a regional meeting May 4 in Egypt. Then there were ambassadorial-level meetings in Baghdad on May 28 and July 24. Now, not quite two weeks later, the three sides have met again.
That the discussions were frank and serious shouldn't surprise anyone. That they continue in spite of obvious deep tensions between the parties is, in our view, extremely significant. The prior ambassadorial talk lasted about seven hours. The Aug. 6 working group session lasted about four hours. These are not simply courtesy calls. The parties are spending a great deal of time talking about something.

This is not some sort of public relations stunt either.

First, neither Washington nor Tehran would bother to help the other's public image.

Second, neither side's public image is much helped by these talks anyway. This is the "Great Satan" talking to one-half of what is left of the "Axis of Evil." If ever there were two countries that have reason not to let the world know they are meeting, it is these two. Yet, they are meeting, and they have made the fact public.

The U.S. media have not ignored these meetings, but they have not treated them as what they actually are -- an extraordinary diplomatic and strategic evolution in Iraq. Part of the reason is that the media take their cues from the administration about diplomatic processes. If the administration makes a big deal out of the visit of the Icelandic fisheries minister to Washington, the media will treat it as such. If the administration treats multilevel meetings between Iran and the United States on the future of Iraq in a low-key way, then low-key it is. The same is true for the Iranians, whose media are more directly managed. Iran does not want to make a big deal out of these meetings, and therefore they are not portrayed as significant.
It is understandable that neither Washington nor Tehran would want to draw undue attention to the talks. The people of each country view the other with intense hostility. We are reminded of the political problems faced by Chinese Premier Chou En-lai and U.S. President Richard Nixon when their diplomatic opening became public. The announcement of Nixon's visit to China was psychologically stunning in the United States; it was less so in China only because the Chinese controlled the emphasis placed on the announcement. Both sides had to explain to their publics why they were talking to the mad dogs.

In the end, contrary to conventional wisdom, perception is not reality. The fact that the Americans and the Iranians are downplaying the talks, and that newspapers are not printing banner headlines about them, does not mean the meetings are not vitally important. It simply means that the conventional wisdom, guided by the lack of official exuberance, doesn't know what to make of these talks.
There are three major powers with intense interest in the future of Iraq: the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The United States, having toppled Saddam Hussein, has completely mismanaged the war. Nevertheless, a unilateral withdrawal would create an unacceptable situation in which Iran, possibly competing with Turkey in the North, would become the dominant military power in the region and would be in a position to impose itself at least on southern Iraq -- and potentially all of it. Certainly there would be resistance, but Iran has a large military (even if it is poorly equipped), giving it a decided advantage in controlling a country such as Iraq.
In addition, Iran is not nearly as casualty-averse as the United States. Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that cost it about a million casualties. The longtime Iranian fear has been that the United States will somehow create a pro-American regime in Baghdad, rearm the Iraqis and thus pose for Iran round two of what was its national nightmare. It is no accident that the day before these meetings, U.S. sources speculated about the possible return of the Iraqi air force to the Iraqis. Washington was playing on Tehran's worst nightmare.
Saudi Arabia's worst nightmare would be watching Iran become the dominant power in Iraq or southern Iraq. It cannot defend itself against Iran, nor does it want to be defended by U.S. troops on Saudi soil. The Saudis want Iraq as a buffer zone between Iran and their oil fields. They opposed the original invasion, fearing just this outcome, but now that the invasion has taken place, they don't want Iran as the ultimate victor. The Saudis, therefore, are playing a complex game, both supporting Sunni co-religionists and criticizing the American presence as an occupation -- yet urgently wanting U.S. troops to remain.
The United States wants to withdraw, though it doesn't see a way out because an outright unilateral withdrawal would set the stage for Iranian domination. At the same time, the United States must have an endgame -- something the next U.S. president will have to deal with.
The Iranians no longer believe the United States is capable of creating a stable, anti-Iranian, pro-American government in Baghdad. Instead, they are terrified the United States will spoil their plans to consolidate influence within Iraq. So, while they are doing everything they can to destabilize the regime, they are negotiating with Washington. The report that three-quarters of U.S. casualties in recent weeks were caused by "rogue" Shiite militia sounds plausible. The United States has reached a level of understanding with some nonjihadist Sunni insurgent groups, many of them Baathist. The Iranians do not want to see this spread -- at least not unless the United States first deals with Tehran. The jihadists, calling themselves al Qaeda in Iraq, do not want this either, and so they have carried out a wave of assassinations of those Sunnis who have aligned with the United States, and they have killed four key aides to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a key Shiite figure.
If this sounds complicated, it is. The United States is fighting Sunnis and Shia, making peace with some Sunnis and encouraging some Shia to split off -- all the time waging an offensive against most everyone. The Iranians support many, but not all, of the Shiite groups in Iraq. In fact, many of the Iraqi Shia have grown quite wary of the Iranians. And for their part, the Saudis are condemning the Americans while hoping they stay -- and supporting Sunnis who might or might not be fighting the Americans.
The situation not only is totally out of hand, but the chance that anyone will come out of it with what they really want is slim. The United States probably will not get a pro-American government and the Iranians probably will not get to impose their will on all or part of Iraq. The Saudis, meanwhile, are feeling themselves being sucked into the Sunni quagmire.
This situation is one of the factors driving the talks.
By no means out of any friendliness, a mutual need is emerging. No one is in control of the situation. No one is likely to get control of the situation in any long-term serious way. It is in the interests of the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia that the Iraq situation stabilize, simply because they cannot predict the outcome -- and the worst-case scenario for each is too frightening to contemplate.
None of the three powers can bring the situation under control. Even by working together, the three will be unable to completely stabilize Iraq and end the violence. But by working together they can increase security to the point that none of their nightmare scenarios comes true. In return, the United States will have to do without a pro-American government in Baghdad and the Iranians will have to forgo having an Iraqi satellite.
Hence, we see a four-hour meeting of Iranian and U.S. security experts on stabilizing the situation in Iraq. Given the little good will between the two countries, defining roles and missions in a stabilization program will require frank and serious talks indeed. Ultimately, however, there is sufficient convergence of interests that holding these talks makes sense.

The missions are clear.

The Iranian task will be to suppress the Shiite militias that are unwilling to abide by an agreement -- or any that oppose Iranian domination. Their intelligence in this area is superb and their intelligence and special operations teams have little compunction as to how they act.

The Saudi mission will be to underwrite the cost of Sunni acceptance of a political compromise, as well as a Sunni war against the jihadists. Saudi intelligence in this area is pretty good and, while the Saudis do have compunctions, they will gladly give the intelligence to the Americans to work out the problem.

The U.S. role will be to impose a government in Baghdad that meets Iran's basic requirements, and to use its forces to grind down the major insurgent and militia groups. This will be a cooperative effort -- meaning whacking Saudi and Iranian friends will be off the table.
No one power can resolve the security crisis in Iraq -- as four years of U.S. efforts there clearly demonstrate. But if the United States and Iran, plus Saudi Arabia, work together -- with no one providing cover for or supplies to targeted groups -- the situation can be brought under what passes for reasonable control in Iraq. More important for the three powers, the United States could draw down its troops to minimal levels much more quickly than is currently being discussed, the Iranians would have a neutral, nonaggressive Iraq on their western border and the Saudis would have a buffer zone from the Iranians. The buffer zone is the key, because what happens in the buffer zone stays in the buffer zone.
The talks in Baghdad are about determining whether there is a way for the United States and Iran to achieve their new mutual goal. The question is whether their fear of the worst-case scenario outweighs their distrust of each other. Then there is the matter of agreeing on the details -- determining the nature of the government in Baghdad, which groups to protect and which to target, how to deal with intelligence sharing and so on.
These talks can fail in any number of ways. More and more, however, the United States and Iran are unable to tolerate their failure. The tremendous complexity of the situation has precluded either side from achieving a successful outcome. They now have to craft the minimal level of failure they can mutually accept.
These talks not only are enormously important but they also are, in some ways, more important than the daily reports on combat and terrorism. If this war ends, it will end because of negotiations like these.

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Oakland's Unholy Alliance

By Andrew Walden
FrontPageMagazine.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.