Antisemite Roger Waters spends a lot of time trying to convince people he is not an antisemite: whenever he gets the chance, he denies he is one, and has even made “Resist Antisemitism” a part of his shows.
But now I see he has come up with a new ploy to deflect from the antisemitism accusations against him.
But for as avant-garde as some of the staging was, there was no illusion about what message Waters wanted to walk away with. The first act ended with school kids from Portobello in London. They started out dressed in orange like prisoners but wore execution-style masks over their head. By the end of the song, they broke free and revealed T-shirts that said, “Resist.” The entirety of the 20-minute intermission was visuals parsing what people should resist. These topics include Mark Zuckerberg (“He is slowly trying to eliminate any website that doesn’t conform to his consumerist world view”), anti-Semitism and “Israeli anti-Semitism” (“Yes, Israel discriminates against Palestinians on the basis of religion and ethnicity”), Nikki Haley (“All she needs is a Darth Vader helmet and she’d be the perfect representative for the evil empire”), neo-fascism, alliances with tyrants, the military industrial complex and profit from war and so on.
It looks like Waters is subscribing to the “palestinians are semites” argument made by so many antisemites I have seen online, who post memes like this:
By making such an argument, Waters not only minimizes the very real issue of antisemitism; he also shows how he is inspired by Jew haters.
They are, of course, barking up the wrong tree. From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Anti-Semitism, hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns under way in central Europe at that time. Although the term now has wide currency, it is a misnomer, since it implies a discrimination against all Semites. Arabs and other peoples are also Semites, and yet they are not the targets of anti-Semitism as it is usually understood.
And needless to say, Israel does not “discriminate against Palestinians on the basis of religion and ethnicity.”
Meanwhile, Waters wore a Keffiyeh, symbol of palestinian terrrorism, during his recent Hyde Park concert’s final song “Comfortably Numb.”
More like comfortably scum.
Update: The offending sign at his show (hat tip: Jonathan)
