On Jan 7, 2012, at 12:41 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> There was a conventicle of anti-anti-Semites in the station
> at one point in the early 80s -- I fell foul of them because
> of some stuff I wrote about Israel in a little community
> newspaper.
I didn't frequent the place, or even listen (though I hardly ever listened afterward, either) until 1987. The anti-anti-semites were routed by the time I got there, but there was (and remained through Bernard White) a strain of black nationalism that just doesn't really like the Jews. I'm not now going to morph into Michael Walzer or Norman Podhoretz and go on about the dangers of black anti-Semitism, but I saw this up close for about 20 years. That explosion of black nat anger at Korean grocers during the Dinkins years was not a fine moment. Playthell Benjamin got shit around WBAI for having an Asian wife.
The 1990s were dominated by Samori Marksman, who gave me a slot on his show and then one of my own. I admired and liked him a lot - smart with a great radio manner. Internationalist, not nationalist. He did have a weakness for Third World strongmen. I was once at a lunch thrown by the Libyan ambassador to the UN, thanks to Samori. At one point in the lunch, Samori said, excitedly and loudly, "Your leader is a revolutionary! That's why he's hated." He also did a friendly interview with Charles Taylor in his early days. But he did a great show - good guests and he interviewed them well. When he died in 1999, there was no one like him around. And then all the craziness of the 2000s began.
> And there were a lot of old CP stagers (who either never sleep
> at all, or sleep like bats, during the day, no doubt hanging
> from their heels to do it). These types had a pretty
> well-rehearsed spiel, which fell into two main heads:
> 1) The imminent menace of a new Hitler, complete with death
> camps, and 2) what a wonderful fellow X was, where X was
> some liberal Democrat in elected office -- councilman,
> congressman, etc.
Long gone. Doug