Roger Waters: Unplugged And Unhinged

roger waters hardtalkA little over a week ago, I posted about Roger Waters slamming Howard Stern, as well as pro-Israel online activists like me.

The comments were taken from what Rolling Stone described as a “soon-to-be-published interview.”

Well, the full interview has now been published, and it sheds light not only the kind of lowlife Waters is, but also the extent of his pathological hatred for Israel.

Here is how the interview starts.

Hey, Roger. Did you see the news about Joe Biden? He just said he’s not running for president.
I can’t understand a word you’re saying. You aren’t making any sense.

I was just saying that Joe Biden announced he’s not running for president.
Aaaaannnnd …

And I’m surprised. I really thought he was going to go for it.
[Three-second pause] Thanks for sharing your opinion.

Granted, that was a weird line of questioning. But did Waters really need to be a jerk about it?

As for his Israel-bashing, Waters goes off in unhinged fashion in response to a totally unrelated question.

Are you tempted to do more Wall shows in the future or are you done with it?
If Israel works toward equality and actual, real, genuine democracy, with no apartheid or racism infecting the society, then I will go over there and play The Wall again. I have the bits and pieces of the stage stored, and the ones I haven’t got stored, I will rebuild.

I’ve spoken to the Israelis and the Palestinians, and particularly the Israelis, since they hold all the power. Again, if the illegal wall that is winding its way remorselessly across the — yes, we can call them the occupied territories; yes, we can call it a country, Palestine — if that wall ever comes down, I’ll do it. This was a promise that I made a number of years ago and it stands today.

Are you hopeful that day is going to come in the foreseeable future?
It’s interesting you should say that. I was lying in bed last night, flipping through channels as one does when you can’t find any more replays of the Champions League, and suddenly I came to something and I thought, “Hmmm, that looks interesting. I think I’ll have a look at that.” And it was JLTV, which stands for Jewish Life Television. What caught my interest and made me chuckle was that they called it, “JLTV, the chosen network.” [Laughs] Oh, my God, I was laughing out loud. Wow, how unbelievably inappropriate is that?

There was a perfectly nice young woman on that ran an organization that I’ve heard of peripherally called Stand With Us, and I think it’s trying to get people to support Israel. Israel that is, not Israelis. Israel, to support the government of Israel and the country that is called Israel. She had on two guests, a young blonde woman and some guy who looked like he might be French. They started to talk about BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] and they were agreeing, the three of them, how awful it was that BDS was organized, how it wasn’t grassroots and that it was organized from the outside. They said that money was being poured in from outside and people supporting the BDS movement at American universities were puppets and almost in the pay of rich Palestinians that were pulling their strings.

They kept showing huge walls that have been built across campuses in southern California and other places. They were beautiful structures, copies of the separation walls, covered in political slogans with people manning them and telling some of the history. And the three moderators were desperately trying to knock down the BDS protest against Israeli occupation, terrorism and racism. Every time they opened their mouths they gave more credence to the thing they thought they were attacking.

I sat there with my mouth open and just thought, “This is fantastic. You have this television program preaching to the choir, where they might just as well taken their boots off, rolled their socks down, handed them some Glock 9mm [guns] and be shooting themselves in the foot, describing all this nonsense.

When they were describing Palestinian action, they were actually describing themselves, the Hasbara the arm of the Prime Minister’s office that we all know starts with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. It’s very organized, and I see it all over my Facebook page all the time. It’s this hugely organized thing, which takes no account of history, never looks at facts and just tells this big lie that “this is our land, and it belongs to us, and God gave it to us, and there never were any Palestinian people, and they were always trying to murder us and don’t we have a right to protect ourselves,” which is basically their platform.

When you talk about this issue, people often label you an anti-Semite.
[Laughs] They try to. You know, funnily enough I am doing a gig with G.E. Smith, my great friend, in a tiny theater in Sag Harbor next Saturday, 300 people. It’s been sold out for months. It’s a series of shows G.E. is doing where he invites one other musician. It’s called Portraits. I saw him the other day and I said, “What are we going to do, G.E.?” He said, “Don’t worry. We’ll talk a bit, play a bit of music, and you’ll be alright. You know what to do.”

But it got picked up by somebody, and I got sent a link to a blog item about little, old local Jewish ladies, God bless them, who have decided to protest. They are writing letters to the theater saying I shouldn’t be allowed to perform. The theater, I am happy to say, is claiming that I’m an important musician who should be allowed to speak, at least, or play his music, or whatever I want to do. Quite rightly.

So, I know people could turn around and say, “Well, hang on a minute. It’s all very well to say that you have freedom of speech, but what about Alan Parsons in Tel Aviv? You tried to stop him.” And I can have that conversation all afternoon. And it would not be all that interesting because it’s really quite simple. The analogy is with the civil rights in the southern states of the United States and pre-Mandela South Africa. We all know how important the cultural and sports boycott of South Africa became in the organizing of global civil society to express the generally heartfelt horror of the way the white-supremacist South African government was oppressing the black population of that country.

This is the same way that global society, by and large, feels about Israel. But a lot of people in America don’t know that because it’s not reported that same way. It’s not the Israeli people, not Jews, not Judaism. I would never dream of attacking them. In fact, a lot of the Israelis are the people who are fighting the hardest because they believe it is the most effective tool for changing policies of their own government. So we could have that conversation, but let’s not.

Waters says he would never dream of attacking Jews or Judaism, but he just did a few paragraphs above, with his snide comments about Jewish Life Television and its slogan!

So when someone like Howard Stern …
Ha!

When he says you want the Jews sent back to concentration camps, how do you feel?
You know, I wouldn’t waste a single one of my precious breaths on that asshole, and I just did. That was a waste of breath. Let’s move on.

And I have wasted more than a few breaths on this one. But it is worth it to help get the word out on this nasty piece of work.

5 thoughts on “Roger Waters: Unplugged And Unhinged”

  1. Anybody that floats a giant inflatable pig with a Magen David on to the ceiling at a concert, as his backdrop is an Antisemite. And yes Roger, that means YOU.

    You’d have made a very “Good German”.

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