USA: Black nghbrhds: Battle vs liquor pitches Muslims vs Muslims USA

Just as in France and in Australia, riots and terrorist attacks have broken out where the Muslim role is alleged as determinative but precise info is lacking, where the exact ethnicity on the initiating side of the violence and counter-violence is not known for sure, not definitive; but recently in tandem with the religious factor the race factor was starkly present for sure in several violent organized actions on the basis of race and religion.

In the USA, a religion-&-race conflict last week took place where the religious factor seems quite definite, and the racial/ethnic divide within the religion is one that's now reached the boil-over point. Justin M. Morton reporting for Associated Press via Washington Post (Jan9,2k6) tells us the intra-religion clash in significant part comes from the extreme role of alcohol in damaging the quality of daily life; that fact is made starkly evident by the over-abundance of liquor stores in black neighborhoods of Oakland, California.

They weren't your ordinary thugs. Dressed in bow ties and dark suits, nearly a dozen men carrying metal pipes entered a corner store, shattered refrigerator cases and smashed bottles of liquor, wine and beer, terrifying the clerk but stealing nothing.

They just wanted to leave a message: Stop selling alcohol to fellow Muslims. In urban America, friction between poor residents and immigrant store owners is nothing new. Nor are complaints that inner-city neighborhoods are glutted with markets that sell alcohol and contribute to violent crime, vagrancy and other social ills.

An Oakland police car is parked in front of San Pablo Market in Oakland, Calif., Monday, Nov. 28, 2005. Authorities say that last week a dozen men dressed in suits and bow ties stormed the shop, smashed liquor bottles and told the owner to stop selling alcohol to black people. Another Oakland liquor store nearby, New York Market, was heavily damaged by an apparent arson fire on Monday, just days after it was trashed, authorities say.

An Oakland police car is parked in front of San Pablo Market in Oakland, Calif., Monday, Nov. 28, 2005. Authorities say that last week a dozen men dressed in suits and bow ties stormed the shop, smashed liquor bottles and told the owner to stop selling alcohol to black people. Another Oakland liquor store nearby, New York Market, was heavily damaged by an apparent arson fire on Monday, just days after it was trashed, authorities say.

But the recent attack at San Pablo Liquor and an identical vandalism spree at another West Oakland store later that evening, along with an arson fire there and the kidnapping of the owner a few days later _ have injected religion into the debate.

The two episodes highlighted tensions _ and different interpretations of the Quran _ between black Muslims in this struggling, crime-ridden city of 400,000 and Middle Eastern shop owners, many of them also Muslims.

While the whole story deserves much meditation, one small detail struck me. How similar was the use of the term "Middle Easterners," who in these cases were on the receiving end as liquor-store owners, and the same term applied to those young men who initiated the terrorist assaults on ("White") life guards at an Australian beach, setting off a major reaction of "Whites" (for lack of a better term, a maybe there were Chinese and Aboriginals in the angry mass movement for revenge). In any case, the target of the revenge was a group identified as "Middle Easterners" (or occasionally "Lebanese"). The naming of the protagonists and the enemies seems blurred at this distance, but in the neighborhoods where these conflicts are erupting, people know what side they're on, and suddenly, they know who the enemy at hand is.

In the American situation - the California episode - some black Muslims feel they have no control over the surplus of "merchants of death" in their environs - and since the merchants are ethnically taggable and go to the same Mosques on Friday as do their black counterparts - the anti-alcholism movement seems to feel there's no public-law order thru which they can get relief. It does seem likely that a ringleader was behind the vigilantes; but the extremity of the course of action remains disturbing as a possible sign of things to come elsewhere on an even larger scale. The vigilantes saw the TV news about the French riots and the Aussie outrage, I'd guess. But more than that, it's clear the Oakland vigilantes are consciously engaged in their own Cultural War according to their own sense of priorities. - Politicarp