Yusef Bey Gets Life for Killing Journalist
Four years ago I used to repeat the catechisms and the bumper stickers of the anti-Islam crowd without questioning it much - the info came from respected think tanks and scholars on the right after all so I did not look at it as critically as I should have.
It was when I did a story on “Your Black Muslim Bakery” and used them as an example of “creeping sharia” that the smoke really began to clear. This post got picked up and blasted around the right wing blogosphere, but one commenter challenged my precept — and rightfully so.
It was then that I started paying attention to who was who in Islamic extremist groups, it was then that I started reading the English papers in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, and other Islamic countries to figure out what was really going on. It was then that I really started to break in full from the idea that Islam itself was the problem.
To set things right, here’s the follow up and finale on that story. Keep in mind that Yusef Bey has about as much commonality with mainstream Sunni or Shia Islam as Warren Jeffs does with Catholicism. The cult Bey is in is really a break away from a minor sect of Islam, the Nation of Islam Black Muslims, and even they have disowned him.
The former leader of an Oakland community group will spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted of ordering the killings of three men, including the first American journalist killed on U.S. soil for reporting a story in more than a decade.
An Alameda County Superior Court judge sentenced Yusuf Bey IV, 25, to three life terms in prison without the possibility of parole Friday.
As head of Your Black Muslim Bakery, Bey ordered his workers to kill the men in separate attacks in July 2007, prosecutors said.
According to trial testimony, Odell Roberson, 31, was killed in retaliation for the murder of Bey’s brother by Roberson’s nephew.
Prosecutors said Michael Wills, 36, was killed randomly after Bey had a conversation about the Zebra murders, a string of racially motivated black-on-white killings in San Francisco in the 1970s. Bey is black, and Wills was white.