PJ Media readers of a certain age will remember Roger Waters, the longtime lyricist and vocalist for the British stoner-rock band Pink Floyd. Waters is 79 years old now and estranged from his former Pink Floyd partner David Gilmour. Rather than enjoy a comfortable retirement, Waters tours energetically as a solo act, singing Floyd hits such as the execrable “Another Brick In the Wall” plus a scattering of solo tunes that no one comes to hear. He also loads up his concerts with an exhausting barrage of far-Left, anti-Israel agitprop that is so unapologetically antisemitic that it even included Waters strutting around onstage a few days ago in a Gestapo uniform — in Berlin, of all places. What has gotten into Roger Waters? Leftism, of course.
To be sure, many of Waters’ indignant fans took to Twitter to insist that Waters wasn’t pro-Nazi. The fascist dictator bit is part of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which dates back to 1979, and Waters was just likening Israel to Germany’s National Socialist regime that murdered six million Jews, as he has done in the past. Waters drove the point home by putting up massive graphics during his show, likening Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera journalist who was killed in a crossfire between Israeli and Palestinian forces, and Anne Frank.
Wow, this is @rogerwaters imitating a Nazi, while at a concert in … Berlin. This is just unhinged Jew hatred and Holocaust distortion. The man is vile beyond words. pic.twitter.com/zn1EvudSXc
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) May 25, 2023
1/Roger Waters comparing the accidental death of a journalist caught in crossfire between terrorists & the Israeli army to the death of Anne Frank in a concentration camp is psychopathic antisemitism. If you are wondering why Germany wanted to cancel his concert, this is why pic.twitter.com/e7R9VJJgtk
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) May 24, 2023
The State Department and the Israel Defense Forces concluded that Israeli troops killed Shireen Abu Akleh accidentally. Meanwhile, filmmaker Pierre Rehov conducted an independent investigation and found that “Palestinian” forces actually killed her. Supporters of the Palestinian jihad such as Roger Waters, however, insist that the killing was intentional. Yet even if Waters is right and the IDF did kill her accidentally, there is no comparison to the Holocaust, except in a mind consumed with hatred and drunk on Leftism — such as that of Roger Waters.
Waters has been obsessed with Israel for years, and last February he told (again, of all papers) the Berliner Zeitung: “The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period… We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine. Well, we weren’t and neither are the Israeli Jews.” Waters said nothing, of course, about the oft-repeated genocidal aspirations of the Palestinian jihadis.
In fact, Waters claims to see the desire for genocide on the other side. Last October, he told Joe Rogan that “the Israelis seem now to have a policy of murdering so many of them, that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada, so they can make it an armed conflict where they’re a thousand times, 10,000 times more powerful than the Palestinian people… so they can just kill them all.”
Some of Waters’ old friends are sick to death of what he is doing. On Feb. 6, David Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, who wrote lyrics for the 1994 Pink Floyd album The Division Bell, tweeted: “Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.” Gilmour himself added: “Every word demonstrably true.”
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Waters responded with regal superiority, referring to himself in the third person: “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely.” He added: “He is currently taking advice as to his position,” which was a clear threat of legal action. In May, Samson responded an antisemitic tweet she had received (which has since been removed): “They’ve been expelled 1,030 times (that we know of) for the crimes of usury, corruption, theft, ritual murder of children, genital mutilations, etc., since 1,200 B.C.E., but now operate with impunity, globally. Who are ‘they?’” Samson replied: “Since calling out Roger Waters’ antisemitism I receive filth like this every day. It’s vile but I have no regrets because being a bystander would be so much worse.”
Roger Waters is a quintessential example of a mind on Leftism. Apparently incapable of self-reflection and impervious to opposing points of view, he indulges in the most revolting hatred and sides with genocidal killers, cheerfully aiding and abetting the demonization of a nation that is a principal object of the Left’s ire. All the while, he is encased in self-righteousness, thinking that he is doing a good and noble thing, calling out injustice. But there is nothing original about Roger Waters. It is common among Leftists to work from half-knowledge and false claims that lead them into unreflective fanaticism and hate, all while thinking that they’re on the side of the good. All in all, Roger Waters is just another brick in the wall.