Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteI dwell too long on stories, revisiting Nahr al-Bared to be there on the last day of hostilities, checking several times each day for an update on the Korean hostage situation (from "crisis" to "ordeal" to "situation" has taken me about a two weeks), and as the days move on, the news slows down on those topics and starts to transform. Interest in the battle for Nahr al-Bared naturally shifts to reconstruction and the provision of aid to the Palestinians whose community was infiltrated and victimized by Fatah al-Islam.
One may wonder how long before the Chauncey Bailey story also starts to sink beneath the sea of fast compiling Internet history.
This morning's insomnia started with a glance at an online community board to which I've been habituated for a while, the off-topic section of modelmayhem.com--it's a pleasant and entertaining enough place, or was, or has been: it's not like I have to be there, lol--and a look over a thread on the Chauncey Bailey murder in Oakland, California two days ago.
From my youth, I remembered The Black Panther presence in the news and started there before going on to Google "Nation of Islam Oakland", which turned out commentary and reporting on the 2005 vigilante action against an Arab liquor store owner, which in light of Islam's prohibition against alcohol may rather and finally lock the sensibility of that history into place.
Back in the day, the politicians and press seem to have focused on that with which they were most familiar: the race card (reference: http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b4e9325402f2cb20b16c3b6e6e49b95f).
In any case, one moves on when it comes to moseying around the Internet.
Any search that starts with "Nation of Islam" soon finds "Black Muslims" and "Yusuf Bey", and already, inside of two days, Wikipedia has the entry [1] with a reference to today's posting (five hours and 30 minutes old here in the Cumberland Valley) of The New York Times article, "7 Arrested in Death of Oakland Newspaper Editor" [2], datelined August 3.
That's pretty good.
Of Yusuf Bey, Wikipedia notes: "His detractors—notably East Bay Express journalist Chris Thompson—accused of him of cultism, corruption, and anti-Semitism. Many accusations of physical and sexual abuse, including rape and incest, and which were sustained by DNA evidence (the DNA of the child of one of the victims shows that the father was Yusuf Bey), were made against Bey, culminating in felony charges which were pending at the time of his death." [1]
Yusuf Bey founded the Your Black Muslim Bakery raided by police yesterday.
Among those arrested for the murder of Chauncey Bailey, according to The New York Times article: Yusuf Bey IV.
I'll leave the rest of the reading (and up to the minute Googling) to you.
2. McKinely, Jesse. "7 Arrested in Death of Oakland Newspaper Editor." The New York Times, August 3, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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