Detroit: Targeted (and Killed) by the FBI for Radical Speech?

A radical black community/religious leader was shot dead by the FBI on Wednesday. No one seems to give a crap. After all, we are being told this dead man was the aggressor. That he was a corrupt criminal, raking profits through illegal business. We are being told he wanted to overthrow the US Govt and install sharia law. We are being told he talked about terrorist attacks.

A couple things. This has nothing to do with domestic terrorism (there are no terrorist charges). The only crime here was conceived of and proposed by the FBI - the sale of some stolen cars (it appears). I've seen no evidence that Mr. Abdullah was engaged in criminal enterprise besides this FBI scheme.

No, in fact, Abdullah was as broke as they come - with a dumpy truck living in the ghetto of Detroit. His mosque was evicted from their digs 10 months ago.

Abdullah's son said the closest Abdullah came to espousing a radical overthrow of the government is to suggest the creation of Islamic law in certain neighborhoods to combat theft, drugs, prostitution and other crimes... "peace where the children can run and play,” he said.”

Is it beyond the pale to simply ask what exactly transpired, where this man had to be shot dead? Can we ask why exactly the FBI was spending so much time spying on this group - the "Ummah"? Was this car selling scheme so dangerous that a full-on raid was needed?

As for Abdullah's character, here is what the leader of the (moderate) Council on American-Islamic Relations, Michigan chapter, said: “I know him as a respected imam in the Muslim community... We have no information about illegal activity going on at that mosque.” He “would give the shirt off his back to people. The congregation he led was poor. He fed very hungry people in the neighborhood who were Christian. He helped and assisted a lot of troubled youth. People would come up to him who were hungry and he would let them sleep in the mosque. He would let them in from the elements.”

The leader of this supposed group (the "Ummah") is 60s radical H. Rapp Brown (now Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin), who was spied on by the Feds in SNCC and the Black Panthers in the 60s - and now in the 00s apparently. It would be understandable if the group had a sour view of the Feds. But that is not a crime. And neither is idle (non-threatening) speech. Without the FBI invented crime, that is all we have here.

Plus a dead body and 11 in jail. And no one gives a hoot.

Detroit: Indifference to Dead Man Encased in Ice

DETROIT (AP) -- In an abandoned warehouse, the image was stark and shocking: two denim-clad, lifeless legs poking up through trash-choked ice.

Investigators who took three 911 calls over two days before finally going out to retrieve the body will now try to figure out what killed the man, but this much is clear -- it's become another symbol of Detroit's decay and indifference.
...
"Most of us grew up with this," said Mike Corbin, 34, pointing toward the old warehouse and brooding, dilapidated Michigan Central train depot nearby. ''It's depressing. Chicago and New York have their own problems, but those are in certain areas. But in Detroit, it's the entire city."
...
"When you hear somebody say it's a dead body near a train station, you say 'and?'" said 28-year-old Bianca Glenn over her vegan Jamaican stew at the Mercury Coffee Bar near the abandoned warehouse. "I'm kind of desensitized to it."


Scott Ruben, 38, one of the homeless men living in the building, had noticed the body for weeks but didn't report it.

Detroit News:

A colony of homeless men live in the warehouse. Wednesday morning a few fires were burning inside oil drums. Scott Ruben, 38, huddled under filthy blankets not 20 paces from the elevator shaft.

His shack mate, Kenneth Williams, 47, returned at that point with an armload of wood.

"Yeah, he's been down there since last month at least... I thought it was a dummy myself," he said unconvincingly. Besides, Williams said, there were more pressing issues like keeping warm and finding something to eat. "You got a couple bucks?" he asked.
...
There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

"I hate that musical chair game," Ruben said. He said he'd rather live next to a corpse.