Rock’n’roll BDShole Roger Waters has been interviewed by one Dimitri Lascaris, a fellow Israel hater who has used social media to advocate on behalf of terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians.
The interview is what we have come to expect from Waters – long, unhinged, denials of antisemitism, full of lies, and generally showing the dark side of this moron.
“Highlights” include:
- Waters attacking pro-Israel activists as being incompetent and tiny in number!
BDS projection, much?
D. Lascaris: So Roger, I want to begin by relating The Occupation of the American Mind to your recent experiences in Canada. When you and filmmaker Sut Jhally came on The Real News last year, you talked about some of the techniques that Israel advocates typically employ in order to achieve their propaganda objectives. During your Canadian tour, did you sometimes feel that you were being targeted with the very tactics you examined in The Occupation of the American Mind?
Roger Waters: Yeah. That is the impression that one gets. In fact, that’s not the impression that one gets. That is the reality of what happens. It’s interesting to be part of it, because for a number of reasons.
One is that they’re deadly serious.
Two is that they’re very single minded.
Three is that they’re almost completely incompetent.
And four is that they are tiny in number. So there mass protests outside my gigs would be, five people? Maybe? Or six. This ridiculous film that this so-called filmmaker Ian Halperin has made, I’ve seen the first 32 minutes of it.
- Waters answer to criticism he does not focus on human rights abuses in other areas of the world is telling – he plays dumb regarding which other countries have human rights abuses, claims this is a diversionary tactic, and then says he may one day look at other countries.
Roger Waters: Well, it is true that I have taken a lot of notice of and studied in quite some considerable detail Israel’s abuses of human rights. And I have been doing that for the last ten or eleven years. I’m not quite sure which other countries they would prefer me to be focusing my attentions on. I think it’s a diversionary tactic.
To say, “Do not look at Israel’s abuses of human rights and all the illegalities that we, the Israeli government, are committing in the pursuit of the colonization and occupation of land that used to be called Palestine. Don’t look at us. Please don’t ask us any awkward questions. Don’t join a peaceful protest movement that is trying to bring pressure to bear on us in order to bring us in line with international law, and so on and so forth. Go and look at something else.”
Well, maybe I will when this battle is over, which maybe one day it will be. Maybe there will be some other beleaguered people who’s rights are being trampled on, and maybe I will engage myself in that struggle as well, because I care about all people who’s human rights are being trampled, all over the world, whoever they might be, whatever their race or religion or political persuasion.
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So it’s not rocket science, this. And the diversionary tactic will not work. If you’re oppressing somebody, it is no defense if you, standing with your boot on the guy’s throat, to say, “Oh, look over there, there’s somebody else with a boot on somebody’s throat.”
No. We’re talking about your boot, and their throat, at the moment. We’ll go and have a look over there later.
- The usual lies about Gaza, while projecting and claiming those who support Israel are lying
I don’t spread hatred, and I do not spread lies. I’m very, very careful not to tell lies about anything or anyone. Because I am a sincere supporter of a non-violent global protest movement against the occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and also the containment of the large civilian population in Gaza where there are 1.8 million people kept in what is an open-air prison. It’s not a virtual prison, it is a prison. Where they are denied the basic stuff of life. They are denied water, electricity, they’re denied all the things that you need to stay alive.
Miraculously, they’ve managed to survive so far. But life is becoming untenable in Gaza. They are being starved out of existence. It is one of the most heinous examples of collective punishment that we can see anywhere on the collective globe. These people, who attack me, do so because they have an allegiance, I suppose, to Zionism and to the state of Israel, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have these allegiances. But unfortunately, in expressing their allegiance, they resort to propaganda and to lies.
If you read what they have written on their little truck, saying that I’m speaking hatred and lies, it’s actually they’re looking in a mirror. Because that is what they’re doing. I’ve never used the words, I didn’t use words like hatred. And I certainly don’t tell lies.
- Waters’ denying (again) he is an antisemite (something I have shown to be the case here)
They tell lies. They say, for instance, that I’m an anti-Semite. Which is a bare-faced, out-and-out, lie. And anybody who knows what anti-Semite means, and is a reasonable person, of any faith, whatever their faith or color or nationality, will absolutely agree that you can accuse me of being many things. Outspoken, you could accuse me of being. Political, you can accuse me of being. You cannot accuse me of being anti-Semitic. They conflate the idea of criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government, and previous Israeli governments, with anti-Semitism. Which it isn’t. They’re just wrong. It’s a misunderstanding. It’s semantics. It’s a misunderstanding of the meanings of the words, anti and Semite.
So it’s something that, hopefully, we could have cleared up years and years ago. But we can’t. And the reason that we can’t clear it up is because they have no reason or defense of the policies of the Israeli government, and its occupation of its beleaguered, neighboring, people. In consequence, they try to deflect the conversation, always, away from the realities by calling people, like me, names like anti-Semite. It’s simply to deflect the spotlight away from the reality of what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinian people.
- Waters blaming the lack of peace solely on Israel (no mention of palestinian terrorism or incitement, naturally), referring to the palestinians as “indigenous population” (which they are not), and claiming the Six Day War was not a war of self-defense for Israel!
The way this is going to go, I suspect now, now that the two state solution has been destroyed by the duplicity of successive Israeli governments, it’s quite clear from what has happened that they never had any intention of making peace with the Palestinian indigenous population. The land that they took over when the created the state of Israel, or the land that they invaded all around Jerusalem, but all over the West Bank as well, when they invaded neighboring land in 1967 during the Six Day War.
Which is another popular misconception, but which goes a long way to point at the success of the Israeli propaganda machine that has put out or explained, as they call it, that they’ve managed to persuade many people that Israel was attacked in 1967. It was extraordinary how many people think that, and that they defended themselves. As we know, that’s not true at all. It was a sneak, by the European this morning, surprise unilateral attack on Egypt and Suez.
