SECTION EIGHTEEN
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COLUMN SEVENTY-SIX, OCTOBER 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)

THE SINGER-SONGWRITER JOHN HAMMOND WAS GOING TO SIGN

Subject: ned massey
Date: Sat, 03 Aug 2002 12:43:39 -0400
From: ned massey <radmass@mindspring.com>
Organization: nick missouri music
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

hi

My name is Ned Massey and I am a singer/songwriter who was the last discovery of John Hammond, the famous Columbia Records A&R man who signed  Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen,  and artists back as far as Count Basie and Benny Goodman. John Hammond came out in the national press and said I was the best thing he'd heard since Dylan and Springsteen (his words, not mine). Hammond was in the process of signing me when he died (in fact, he had a massive stroke while in the studio with me recording what was to be my debut album).

Just about everything that can go wrong in the music business has happened to me, so when the last label I was on went under the month my album was to be released, I decided to make my own album and release it on the internet. The album is called, "A Brief Appearance," and is available on CDBABY.com and soon on Amazon.com.

Dylan and Springsteen are the reasons I became a songwriter and the reason I sought out John Hammond to hear my music.  

I have plenty of good John Hammond stories so if you'd like to be in touch, e me at ned@nedmassey.com.  

and if you'd like to know more about me or my music, visit my web site http://www.nedmassey.com .

thanks
ned massey  ##

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DON KIRSHNER IS BACK!

Subject: re: the monkees
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 17:34:53 -0400
From: me@gregoryking.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

Don Kirshner is BACK!! He is the CEO of Kirshner International and he's got Ron Dante with him! <singing> "Ah Honey Sugar Sugar.." This could really be great Mark. I found Don's website too www.donkirshner.com , you won't believe some of the cool pics!  

Love You!
Sandy  ##

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FROM 'ANGEL'S' MOM (HE DOES HAVE ONE!)

Subject: Matthew Angel Remak--"That Day"
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 01:13:53 -0400
From: "Kathy Remak" <kj.rem@verizon.net>
To: <info@blacklistedjournalist.com>

Dear Al,

I am Matt, Angel's mother (he does have one) and even though I live in San Francisco, Matt has recently returned to the vivid streets of New York to reabsorb the life there and is out and about in Manhattan. I do have a contact number for him and it has come to my attention from Carl Macki that you or someone else is seeking Matt, to make contact.  Please E-mail me and I will make sure the number is passed back to whomever seeks Matt Angel Remak.  My E-mail is: kj.rem@verizon.net  

Thanks,

Kathy Remak (PS I enjoy your columns and writings very much)  ##

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A KHUN WAYNE MUSIC REVIEW: THE BREEDERS

Subject: The Breeders (an exclusive rum review)
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 02:41:00 EDT
From: KhunRum@aol.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

A great concert that got better as the evening wore on. Two mid-30 something sisters. Scraggly haired, chain smoking, longneck chugging, thick wasted, dissipated, totally out of shape hags. They both looked like they had been servicing the Serb Army in some Eastern European Ho-House for the past decade. Catchy and sprightly punkish tunes. Three minute, three cord ditties. The crowd loved them and so did the Khun Man. I suggest a few Vodka and Red Bull's for maximum enjoyment. If they come to your town don't miss them.....  ##

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NOW 100, LENI SAYS SHE DIDN'T KNOW NOTTING

Subject: Fwd: "I Vas Non Political I vas completely neutral"
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 01:05:21 EDT
From: KhunRum@aol.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

Gotta give the old crone some props. Still above ground at 100..... I knew notting about dos terrwible terrwible tings that vas happening to da Chews.

Posted on Sun, Aug. 18, 2002  

Now near 100, Hitler's last living confidant still in his shadow
BY CAROL J. WILLIAMS
Los Angeles Times Service

POECKING, Germany - Little wonder that Leni Riefenstahl finds solace nowadays in the silent world of deep-sea diving, where neither public reproach nor pangs of conscience intrude.

On terra firma, the last living confidant of Adolf Hitler can't escape accusations that her genius cinematography helped whip Germans into a nationalistic frenzy in the years before World War II.

Only deep under the sea, from the Maldives to the South Pacific, can the soon-to-be centenarian pursue her photographic art unhindered by persistent allegations that she knew, or should have known, she propagated evil.

But even with the benefit of hindsight on the Holocaust, Riefenstahl says she regrets her association with Hitler only because it stunted her filmmaking career and besmirched her reputation.

Although her propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, helped propel Hitler to godlike stature in Germany, she has insisted that her role in the Third Reich's deadly rampage was purely artistic.

"Altogether I only worked with him for six days, as that is how long the party congress lasted," Riefenstahl said of the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg that was the subject of her notorious documentary film and the scene of Hitler's first ominous fanning of the flames of racial hatred.

"It's often said of me that I was a friend of the Nazis, but that cannot be justly maintained. I was neither a member of any political party nor ever expressly sympathetic," Riefenstahl said in an interview at her two-story wooden home in this quiet Bavarian village. "I was completely neutral."

Riefenstahl soared to early success in each of the careers she pursued, from modern dance to silent-movie star to directing by the time she was 30. But the war years were her undoing.

Destined to take whatever secrets she harbors to her grave, the erstwhile beauty who will turn 100 on Thursday sees her life as unbowed perseverance through jealousy and injustice.

"I haven't had an easy life, but that is natural for someone who was very admired and famous and then falls into a crisis," she said. "All this happened to me because I lived in a time that also gave the world Hitler."

Those who accuse her of collusion with the original axis of evil have misjudged her, she insisted, but they will never defeat her.

Remarkably fit and lucid for her years, Riefenstahl still clings to the reflected limelight from her days with Hitler even though she disowns him. She proudly shows visitors this month's issue of Vogue magazine, in which an 18-page spread includes images of her working with the dictator, and the 1938 cover of Time magazine, on which she is featured as "Hitler's Leni Riefenstahl."

"I always admitted that, yes, in the beginning I was fascinated by Hitler," she asserted in her 1987 autobiography, A Memoir. "I never denied that. But I had no idea what Hitler was doing."

Triumph portrayed Germany as an invincible nation and Hitler as a messianic figure leading adoring countrymen to their rightful place as a world power. It is considered to this day a masterpiece of propaganda.

Riefenstahl attracted even broader accolades with Olympia, her artistic documentary on the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Her innovative camera work established her as a trailblazer in sports photography techniques now taken for granted, such as slow-motion and mobile filming.

Freed from allied detention or house arrest seven years after the war, Riefenstahl managed to direct one last film begun in wartime before she was driven out of the industry and took up still photography.

Riefenstahl insists she never wanted to make Triumph but that she couldn't refuse Hitler. Like most Germans of that time, she acknowledged, she was impressed by his mesmerizing powers over the masses.

Her refusal to concede culpability in elevating Hitler has always denied her entree in politically correct circles. Still, Riefenstahl insists that respectability has come back to her with time, pointing to her photo exhibit at a Berlin gallery two years ago.  ##

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DEEP-SEATED ANTI-SEMITISM SEEN AS ROOT OF EUROPE'S ANTIPATHY TOWARD ISRAEL

Subject: An Ugly Rumor or an Ugly Truth? - The New York Times, August 4,2002
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 12:19:09 -0400
From: "Julian Tepper" <jutepper@erols.com>
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com

An Ugly Rumor or an Ugly Truth?  

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
August 4, 2002

THE day after the deadly Palestinian attack on Hebrew University in Jerusalem, The Guardian, the left-leaning British newspaper, published an editorial criticizing Israel for what the paper called "random, vengeful acts of terror" against Palestinian civilians during its reoccupation of the West Bank town of Jenin last spring. This after a United Nations report dismissed Palestinian claims that Israel had massacred civilians there.

Over the past several months, such sentiments have become common in much of Europe. A few months ago, when Tom Paulin, a poet, Oxford University professor and regular guest on BBC television, told Al Ahram, Egypt's leading newspaper, that American-born Jews who have settled on the Israeli-occupied West Bank were Nazis who "should be shot dead," his remarks, which outraged some, were also met by approval and admiration.

A. N. Wilson, a prominent conservative British writer and editor, publicly defended Mr. Paulin, who has also published a poem in The Observer magazine that referred to Israeli soldiers as "the Zionist SS."

"Many in this country and throughout the world would echo his views on the tragic events in the Middle East," said Mr. Wilson, who himself wrote in The Evening Standard, the London newspaper, that he had "reluctantly" concluded that Israel no longer had a right to exist.

That, too, is a view that throughout Western Europe seems to command a fair degree of sympathy. In France, demonstrators held posters aloft saying "Death to Jews." In Italy, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily, wrote that Israel was engaging in "aggression that turns into extermination." And Jos?  Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature, said, "We can compare what is happening on the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz."

It all raises a question: Does the ferocious moral condemnation of Israel mark a recrudescence of that most ugly of Western diseases, anti-Semitism? Or is it legitimate, if crude, criticism of a nation's policies? Where does one draw the line? And how does one judge?

The issue is complicated by several factors, not the least of them that many harsh critics of Israel are Jews. When, a few weeks ago, two British university professors called for an academic boycott of Israel, among the roughly 700 scholars who signed their petition were several Israelis.

Other observers, including a number of Jews, don't see anti-Semitism in the European anger at Israel but simply the success of the Palestinians' campaign to portray themselves as an oppressed people. The Palestinians get more sympathy than, say, the Tibetans, because their plight is what Europeans see in their newspapers and on their televisions every day.

Even those most worried about a new wave of anti-Semitism do not argue that it is the same as the anti-Semitism of the 1930's or even the 1950's in Europe, when to express contempt and hatred for Jews was respectable. These days, for the most part, it is not respectable.

"What you have is anti-Semitism without anti-Semites," said Oscar Bronner, the publisher and editor of Der Standard, a major Austrian daily newspaper. "If you talk to people who use anti-Semitic clich's without knowing what they are doing, they are shocked that somebody would think they were anti-Semitic. But it's everywhere. It's in print. It's dinner party conversations. When a dozen Israeli kids are killed because somebody throws a bomb in order to kill Israeli kids, then it's regrettable. If Israel kills a dozen kids as collateral damage when they try to kill a murderer who hides among children, then this is a war crime."

Nonetheless, there has also been a sharp increase in overt, physical anti-Semitism in the past couple of years. In France, such attacks are largely believed to be the work of resident Arabs, but some critics of the critics of Israel see a nasty kind of symbiosis, in which intellectual and journalistic condemnations of Israel have given the Arab hatred of Jews a kind of legitimacy.

AT the same time, Israel and the Palestinians are elements in the broader post-cold-war policy and cultural differences that have emerged between the United States and Europe, especially during the Bush administration.

"What is true is that Europe has moved toward an identification with international agencies acting collectively to help the disadvantaged and the poor, and there's a belief in Europe that the Americans haven't caught up with that," said Tony Judt, aprofessor of European Studies at New York University and a critic of current Israeli policy. "Israel, with its close identification with the United States, and vice versa, embodies this defect, and the fact that Israel is in violation of all sorts of laws about occupation makes it an obvious target, much as South Africa was in the 60's and 70's, because it is against everything that Europeans see themselves as standing for."

The question remains, however: Does the endless scrutiny and criticism of Israel to be found in Europe amount to anti-Semitism? Alexandre Adler, a French Jew and columnist for Le Monde, gives the phenomenon an anti-globalist interpretation. Anti-globalization, which is especially strong in France, is the new anti-Americanism, he argues, and Israel, America's close ally, is seen as an example of supposed American indifference to the plight of the world's poor.

The French anti-globalization activist Jos? Bov?, who won worldwide fame by leading an attack on a McDonald's in southern France, epitomizes this attitude, in Mr. Adler's view. Mr. Bov? led a delegation that appeared alongside Yasir Arafat during Israel's military assault on Mr. Arafat's headquarters a few months ago, but he made no condemnation of Palestinian encouragement of suicide bombings against Israelis. When he returned to France, he made a statement on the radio to the effect that the Mossad, Israel's secret service, was behind the attacks on synagogues in France---a view very close to the popular opinion in France that the Sept. 11 attacks were carried out by the C.I.A.

"These are the people who refused to show solidarity with the United States after 9/11 and who think of Israel as one expression of American opposition to the wretched of the earth," Mr. Adler said. "They're not technically anti-Semitic in what they say, but what they say is nasty and it's of concern."

STILL, those who see a revival of European anti-Semitism masked as sympathy for Palestinians or anti-Zionism argue that the obsessive attention to the moral worth of the tiny country of Israel echoes the special attention that the tiny minority of Jews received in centuries past.

"I have to wonder about people who compare Israelis to Nazis," said Elie Wiesel, the writer, Nobel Peace Prize winner and holocaust survivor. "I ask myself, why do they hate Israel, which is, after all, the Jewish state, so much?" And Martin Sieff of United Press International, surveying press coverage of Israel's reoccupation of Jenin, which came after a week of suicide bombings that killed 33 Israelis, accused West European newspapers of a "wild and remarkably uniform hysteria."

The Guardian, for example, editorialized that Israeli actions in Jenin were "every bit as repellent" as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 against the United States, and many publications simply accepted as fact Palestinian accusations of massacres and atrocities.

Indeed, the death toll in the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which began in September 2000, is just over 2,000 people, roughly 1,500 of them Palestinian. That is a far lower number than in most of the world's conflicts, and a fact that makes condemnation of Israel in Europe seem all the more disproportionate.

For example, Rwanda and Congo have just signed a treaty that may end their war of intertribal slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, but at no point have editorial writers like Mr. Wilson "reluctantly" suggested that those countries should no longer exist.

Similarly, the Russian bombing of civilians in Chechnya and the Chinese policies in Tibet have elicited less moral outrage in Europe than Israel's actions. 

Once again, the question is why.

* Find this article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/weekinreview/04BERN.html  ##

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