Christopher Hitchens enumerates the many crimes emanating from Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland and wonders why the police have been loath to act against these cretins until it became too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey.
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....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.
Of course he's right. Crimes committed by blacks, especially when committed against other blacks and especially if the perpetrators are Muslim, are simply not treated with the same urgency as crimes committed by whites. It's as if the authorities, so burdened by what Shelby Steele calls white guilt, think it's indicative of racial bigotry to treat black crime seriously.
It's not just the police. The media is even worse. On those exceedingly rare occasions when a black person is assaulted or murdered by a white person the media wring their hands for weeks and months about the residual and endemic stain of racism that pervades the land, but on the almost daily occasions when blacks assault whites, the race of those involved is scarcely even mentioned.
Here in our fair city we've had a recent illustration of this phenomenon. In 1969, York, like a lot of other cities in the sixties, suffered a series of race riots. At the height of the disturbances a black woman was shot by a white teenaged sniper and killed. It was a tragedy for which the city has been flagellating itself for forty years, and all sorts of racial lessons have been drawn from it.
However, a year ago a young black man with a shotgun walked up to a pregnant white woman in the parking lot of a food market and, because he wanted to kill some "white devil," unloaded the gun at her head. Miraculously, the woman survived, but the racial implications of this horrific crime have been completely ignored by the media. It's as if black on white crime has no racial significance, but white on black crime, to the extent that it exists, is filled with it.
Gangs of black youths roam our city's streets preying on white victims, but one has to read between the lines to learn the race of those involved. Recently, in broad daylight a retired former superintendent of one of our local school districts was savagely beaten by three black "youths" in the rest room at a public park during a festival, but the media, while deploring the incident, thought the racial aspects too unimportant to mention. One may be assured, though, that if a group of white thugs had beaten a black superintendent we'd be facing another forty years of racial soul-searching here in York.
Whites, especially white liberals, are so burdened by their fear of being seen as "insensitive" that they cannot bring themselves to point out that the kind of virulent racism that really harms people is alive and well in our cities, and resides almost entirely in the black community. Intimidated by race hustlers like Al Sharpton and paralyzed by belief in their own guilt, their denunciations of violent black crime are usually limited to feeble expressions of sociological tut-tutting.
Thanks to Steve Martin for the link to Hitchens' column.
RLC