Roger Waters Lets Down Antisemitic Guard to Ha’aretz
David Lange
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Ha’aretz has an interview with Roger Waters, which for some reason is only available in Hebrew. Perhaps Ha’aretz being Ha’aretz, they do not want too many people thinking badly of old Roger. Either way, they didn’t count on me actually purchasing a subscription just so I could read the interview and shine a light on the responses of this despicable fiend.
In the interview, Waters repeats the same old tired denials of antisemitism, while immediately perpetuating the antisemitic trope of an all-powerful lobby trying to silence him.
In Germany he is accused of anti-Semitism and therefore various cities tried to cancel his performances. Waters claims that the people behind this are “the Israeli lobby and people who believe I’m anti-Semitic because they’ve read all the lies and believe this ridiculous story.” As always, he denies the allegations. “I am not anti-Semitic, never have been and never will be,” he says. “I have nothing against Jews, I criticize the Israeli government and I am part of the BDS movement, so they tried to cancel me in Frankfurt, Munich and Cologne. Munich withdrew and probably Cologne too”; I mean, his shows there are supposed to take place. So is the performance in Frankfurt at the end of the month, ordered by a court that forbade the authorities to cancel it. There, says Waters, “I issued a restraining order to remind them that it is illegal to cancel the show. In an attack on me They also brought up stories about Kristallnacht and accused me of being somehow responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Jews who were rounded up and sent to death by their Frankfurt police” (the hall where Waters was scheduled to appear is the hall where 3,000 Jewish men were arrested after Kristallnacht and taken to a concentration camp).
According to Waters, this is far from the first time he has been attacked on this basis. “When I finished the film ‘Roger Waters – The Wall’ (2014), we had a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival,” he says. “That night a representative from Netflix came and told my representatives that he adored the film, that they wanted it and were interested in ‘doing a deal tomorrow.’ It was all the result of a board meeting with the Israeli lobby who raised his voice and said ‘We must not have anything to do with this man, Waters, he is anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist and we are going to crush him’. And they tried. Believe me. I bear the wounds. But they failed.”
Ha’aretz mentions some of the reasons people (like me) accuse Waters of antisemitism and wrongly concludes that “essentially, the main reason Waters is drawing this particular criticism in the long run seems to be his passionate support for the BDS movement.” This is entirely wrong, and the more the interview goes on, the more we see evidence of actual Jew-hatred.
Like when he makes it abundantly clear that he supports the destruction of the Jewish state:
When you say human rights for the Palestinians, it is not clear whether you mean 1948 or 1967. If the problem is the occupation of the West Bank, there is a chance, at least theoretically, for a two-state solution. But if the problem is not only the occupation of 1967, does the success of your struggle mean the disappearance of the Jewish state? What exactly is your solution?
“The solution is a democratic state in which every citizen and every person living in its territory has equal civil, political and religious rights. If that means the end of the Jewish state, so be it. It’s just like America becoming a Christian-only country. If that were to happen, I would say there is no way. I would say we need to get rid of America because there must not be a country with a Christian supremacist regime where only Christians have rights. It is anti-human, anti-democratic and against everything I believe in. The same is true of the Jewish state of Israel where non-Jews have no rights. There is no way around it. Perhaps the problem is the nomenclature (Jewish state, DS), because the nomenclature is expressed in the behavior of these disgusting thugs, the settlers, like those from Hvara.”
Note how he also alleges non-Jews have no rights in Israel, an outrageous libel that again betrays his antipathy towards the Jewish people.
As does his answer to concerns that if a one-state solution was implemented, the palestinian Arabs might try to butcher us (although Ha’aretz, being Ha’aretz, posits it could go the other way as well).
And what if a one-state solution does not mean a democratic state, but in the real world it might turn into ethnic cleansing? Whether these will be Jews who will kill Arabs or Arabs who will kill Jews – decades of hatred may lead to bloodshed, not peace and harmony.
“I’m trying to understand if it’s a question or not. That’s the story they feed us all their lives. But you can’t say, ‘We don’t want equality and human rights because it could turn into a bloodbath.’ This is the new Hitler saying ‘If I control everything, then We will live in an orderly society.’ If you really believe in freedom and democracy, you should tear up all the papers that Ben Gurion wrote all those years ago and say, ‘We were completely wrong. This is not what we want.We do not want an apartheid state of Jewish supremacy. We want to live in a lovely country where we can live safely, but everyone else can live safely too. It is not good enough that the burden of being the overall oppressor has shifted from the Germans to us. We don’t want to be the oppressors. We want everyone to be free. This is what we want if we want to have our own homeland’.”
The phrase “Jewish supremacy” was popularized by arch antisemite David Duke. It is one Waters have invoked before, and he does it a few more times in the interview:
But we knew, from the very beginning, that there was never any possibility of any of this.
Many people believed in all the nonsense and pretense. But they never had the intention of having a Palestinian state, because they read their Bible, they want Jordan and the entire armed territory. They want it to be an apartheid state of Jewish supremacy.
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What about the hundreds of thousands of people in Israel who are opposing the government and demonstrating in recent months?
“What are they actually protesting about?”
Democracy and freedom.
“No, they are not. You mean democracy and freedom for them, in their little bubble of Jewish supremacy. This is not democracy and it is not freedom.”
By the way, many of those protesting are “pro-palestinian,” with palestinian flags appearing at many of the protests. Yet to Waters, they are also “Jewish supremacists.”
Waters also laughably claims he would theoretically support a return to the 67 borders, even more laughably claiming “it is not that complicated.”. Yet he is on record, time and again, as opposing the entirety of Israel as a Jewish state.
So there is no chance of a two-state solution?
“Please! If you return to the borders of ’67, remove the settlers and allow the Palestinians a separate and sovereign state. You can do it tomorrow. It’s not that complicated.
This is all not to say that Waters does not attempt a bit of good old fashioned tuchus licking:
Well, you can’t accept that, because the rest of global civil society won’t stand by. And the people who have been watching over you all these years, the United States of America, are finding that they can’t support you either, and the Jewish community in North America is changing its position faster than you can imagine. Because many of them are wonderful people who are really watching over their religion, people who have read the The Talmud and strive to fulfill many of the great things written in it.”
The Talmud is indeed a wonderful book. It also happens to contain plenty about our connection to our homeland here in Israel.
Also in the interview: Waters again displaying his double standards when it comes to boycotting countries, yet another indication of his antisemitism:
“The balance of power is changing. After all, this is the Paris Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 – you cannot choose to support human rights in one place and not another. Either you’re in or you’re out, or you believe in human rights or you don’t. And most governments don’t. So, you say, why don’t I boycott America? Because I can’t! I cannot boycott America and Britain and France and Germany. I mean of course I can, I could go and live on an unarmed island and do nothing for the rest of my life. But I think that because Israel is so extreme and it is becoming more and more extreme as the minutes pass, maybe it is there that we will win and achieve human rights for the Palestinian people.”
And Waters downplaying Chinese human rights abuses:
“Depends on what story you read. I don’t believe the Western narrative about the Uyghurs. I do not believe that there are millions of people imprisoned in concentration camps who are slowly being murdered and tortured to death. I don’t believe the talk about the women being raped by the Chinese government. Is there a problem in this part of China? It’s possible. Probably. Are all Muslims re-educated in the camps? Almost certainly not. Do some of them go through it? It is very possible, if they are members of ISIS for example. If I were in China and if I spoke Chinese I could answer that. I can’t trust the Western mainstream media to tell me what’s going on there, and I don’t believe them any more than I believe this Russia-Gate nonsense (Investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 US election, DS). All this phobia against other countries is broadcast every day, all day, in the media and leads to a third world war. In my show I say ‘No one can rule the world. The world is there to be respected, nurtured, loved, protected and shared. You can call it corny, I don’t care. But that’s the problem with the whole geopolitical situation. The US wants to rule China, it wants to rule Russia, it wants to rule the world, it admits it, it appears in all its political manifestos and it is destroying the world.”
Yet Waters believes every lie and bit of fake news about the world’s only Jewish state, and promotes boycotting it and it only.
Perhaps all of this is even too much for Ha’aretz. As I posited above, they have not released the interview in English. There is also this, which seems to be a bit of a dig at Waters:
“It is they (the US) who have been pushing NATO further and further east since the end of the Cold War,” he says. “Are they going to beat Russia? No, not without a nuclear war. So why are they doing it? Well, it’s because they have idiots like (U.S. National Security Adviser) Jake Sullivan and (Secretary of State)Anthony BlinkenChattering in the ear of a really, really old man with Alzheimer’s who doesn’t understand anything and won’t understand anything” (Biden, by the way, is older than Waters himself by less than a year).
It is funny to think Ha’aretz of all publications have helped shine a light on Waters’ rampant Jew-hatred and hypocrisy.
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David Lange
