Brooklyn Ron

Obama Election Highlights Transition in Williamsburg: Avant-garde of the New Brooklyn

Perhaps nothing has so clearly reflected Brooklyn's demographic changes as the election night clashes between police and young residents celebrating the victory of Barack Obama.

The most poetic reality of that evening and following morning was its similarity to past treatment of minorities, especially Latinos and Blacks, by police in New York City.

These Williamsburg revelers -- some of whom were soon to be arrestees -- were mostly young whites, politically progressive and representative of the social transformations that have hit the regal borough in the past decade or so.

The changes have upset some of the older folk, who at a Nov. 17 meeting expressed their frustrations with the new, noisier inhabitants; and the changes have also strained relations with police, tensions noted in a Brooklyn Paper article referring to the newcomers as "hipsters."

It was perhaps only to be expected that many of the hipsters, on election night, would have been armed with digital video cameras, leading to some interesting visual accounts of what transpired. One of the clipped reels has audio of the bygone song, "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound," which can be seen and heard by clicking below. (Note: another posted clip follows that one.)

Here's another that ends with a fellow saying he was arrested for "not being on the sidewalk."

Imam Siraj Wahhaj, Villified by Media, Remains the Hero of Fulton Street

Much is being made today of the fact that Imam Siraj Wahhaj is behind a soon-to-come subway ad of some kind.

In the New York Post and elsewhere in the mainstream media, he is being all but called a terrorist as they noted that Wahhaj is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

But believe me, if after 15 years the government had any evidence to indict Wahhaj, it would have.

And I say that as someone who had close family who worked at the World Trade Center and who considered it almost a second home.

Here's the truth about Wahhaj. Back in the mid 1980s the crack epidemic was ravishing Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Wahhaj's mosque, called At-Taqwa, was and still is located.

Merchants, many of them frightening immigrant Muslims, were being held up. Complaints were made to the 79th precint but nothing happened.

Then Wahhaj went out on his own with members of his mosque, including at least one who was a Uniformed Court Officer, and began knocking on the doors of those known to be thugs and drug dealers.

The dealers complained to the police and Wahhaj and his Muslim companions were themselves arrested. While at the 79th precinct, a white police officer slapped Wahhaj.

Fortunately at the time, the police commissioner was Ben Ward, who was a hardliner but carried certain sensibilities because he happened to be black. The officer who slapped Wahhaj was demoted, and after this correspondent wrote an article about the whole affair (which article, we promise, we will locate and post), community support grew for Wahhaj and his band of citizen cops.

Suddenly there were civilian patrols on Fulton Street and the busy intersection of Fulton and Bedford Avenue became a safer place. To this day, merchants in that area owe much to Wahhaj and the members of his mosque.

Please remember this and put the screaming headlines that ignorantly defame Wahhaj into perspective.

We need not say more for now, other than to suggest that Wahhaj's message, from our perspective, seems like that of Catholic priests and others who argue that their people should be respected and that there is a world beyond this world that is a spiritual world, where good and righteousness prevail.

Wahhaj, who is African American and speaks fluent Arabic, once led members of the United States Congress in prayer. In one video he says:

"Allah lets you know that nothing is permanent but him…All your life you learn to love things and as soon as you get real close Allah snatches it away from you . . . to let y ou know to be humble and that you should always put your trust in allah. Not in money, not in material things, but in Allah."

Here's the video:

Knowing How Clinton Dissed Her Black District, Yvette Clarke Must Be Dying to Bolt for Barrack

Okay, this is based on circumstantial evidence, but that's the only way to know what a politician is really thinking in Central Brooklyn.

I recently came across  a clipping about Yvette Clarke's race for the historic black Congressional seat that she won two years ago.

The seat, you may recalled was first won by the late Shirley Chisholm exactly 40 years ago, and it was created to give Brooklyn's substantial and then still-growing black population a voice in the halls of Congress.

Well, in 2006 the seat, vacated by Major Owens, was up for grabs and Yvette Clarke was running against a field that included white City Councilman David Yassky, who was widely perceived by black pols as a reverse carpetbagger.

Yassky, who moved into the district in order to legitimately compete in the race, would have, had he won, gone down in history as the one who broke the sting of black representatives in Shirley Chisholm's Congressional District.

And who was apparently backing him in that effort, at least according to strong circumstantial evidence?

Hillary Clinton!

You see, it seems Clinton's very close aide Howard Wolfson, through his company, the Glover Park Group, worked for Yassky during the heated and racially charged campaign. And there are those who say there's no way he would have done it without Clinton's support.

Now, given what Hillary Clinton has been saying of late about her appeal with struggling white voters -- comments that even her strongest black backers like Charlie Rangel have called "dumb" -- one has to wonder about Clinton's instincts when it comes to matters of race.

It's said that irritation over Clinton's suspected involvement in the Yasssky campaign is why Yvette Clarke took so long to endorse the New York Senator. Clarke was the last New York Democratic Congressmember from the state to do so.

And so now we understand the joy that we saw on Clarke's face when she greeted Barack Obama in Congress last week, in his pre-victory lap. That's when she asked him to sign her copy of The New York Daily News that had Obama on the front page, declaring, "It's His Party."

Perhaps what we were seeing was relief that maybe her day of deliverance is finally at hand. (see previous BrooklynRon post.)

That is to say, maybe -- if and when Clinton ever concedes she can't win the nomination -- she'll be free to dump the Hill and opt for Barack, as the voters of Clarke's district did in the Feb. 5th primary.

By the way, this photo we discovered from last year, with Clarke standing next to Clinton, doesn't show Yvette looking very happy, does it?

Al Sharpton at His Best, Protesting Police Killings of Young Men

Whatever one may think about him -- and the thoughts range a very wide gamut -- there's no doubt that the Rev. Al Sharpton has virtually no equal in New York City history when it comes to aggressively opposing unjustified killings of young Black and Latino men by New York City Police.

There he was again on Wednesday [see wcbs story], putting out his wrists for the waiting handcuffs as he led city-wide protests resulting in the arrests of more than 200 men and women, black, brown and white, who were protesting a judge's acquittals of three police officers in the gunning down of Sean Bell in Queens two years ago.

Judge Cooperman's decision was broadly considered to be an outrage, and the most base of motives have been attributed to him, namely that he is near retirement and did not give a damn what the public thought or said about what he did.

What he did was withhold even the lightest hammer of punishment or disapproval that he could have brought down on the cops who pumped dozens of bullets toward and into Bell, killing Bell and wounding two friends with whom he was -- it is conceded -- celebrating a raucous bachelor's night -- his own.

It is not a stretch to suggest that Brooklyn's Congressman Vito Fossella, had he been stopped for drunk driving in New York rather than Virginia last week -- and had he been a young Black male -- would have been putting his life on line.

Think about that.

Ray Kelly, though he is often thought of as accommodating and liberal on the race issue compared to his predecessor Howard Safir, the yes-man commander under race-baiting Rudy Giuliani, has failed to confront this continuing problem of police abuse in a firm manner.

And so Al Sharpton remains the city's necessary counter-weight.

Sharpton's finest moment, and one of the finest moments in the annals of New York City activism, occurred nine years ago when he led huge protests against the police killing of African immigrant Amadou Diallo.

As some like to say, la luta continua.