02 December 2005
Chip Johnson, of The San Francisco Chronicle, reports on last week’s vigilante attacks on two Oakland liquor stores by a group of black, bow-tied men — not the Nation of Islam, which condemned the attacks in a news conference — possibly affiliated with a group that runs a local business, Your Black Muslim Bakery. Both liquor store owners, immigrants from Yemen, were accused of selling alcohol to the black community in violation of Islamic law, but as Johnson notes, much like the recent rioting in France, the tensions between the vigilantes and the store owners tended more towards the racial than the religious, with some black Muslims believing that the Arab immigrants were exploiting the neighborhood with businesses that would be outlawed for religious reasons in their native countries.