Posted on 04/17/2020 4:32:46 PM PDT by edwinland
ve read some heavy-duty attacks on Israel and Jews in my time, but they pale beside the anti-Semitic diatribe recently offered by Roger Waters, co-founder and former front man of the legendary British rock band Pink Floyd. In an interview with CounterPunch online magazine, Waters experienced a shocking Jew-hating colonic.
According to Waters, Israel is a “racist apartheid regime” that practices “ethnic cleansing.” A great artist such as himself will not play in a country equivalent to “Vichy government in occupied France.” Likening Jews to Nazi collaborators was not enough. Waters then went further, comparing Israel to the Nazis themselves. “I would not have played in Berlin either … during the Second World War.” Waters believes that Israel is guilty of genocide, only “this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”
Waters was on a roll. Israel is a “brutal and oppressive regime.” And the rabbis, oh, those murderous, racist rabbis. “The right-wing rabbinate is so bizarre. They believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on Earth to serve them and the indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 … since they are subhuman. The parallels with what went on in the ’30s in Germany are so crushingly obvious.”
The Jews are dumping a “huge bucket of crap that they are pouring into the mouth of a gullible public, in my view, when they say, ‘We are afraid of Iran; it is going to get nuclear weapons.’ … It’s a diversionary tactic.”
I could go on quoting Waters’ interview, but I’m getting nauseated just writing this stuff. Suffice it to say that he claims he was offered “$10 million” by a Jewish promoter to play in Israel but retorted, “Are you f—ing deaf or just dumb?! I am part of the BDS movement; I’m not going anywhere in Israel, for any money.” He then tried to dissuade Cyndi Lauper from playing in Israel.
Given this interview, I would assume that not too many Israelis will lament losing the chance to see a Pink Floyd reunion in Israel, and maybe we should just leave it at that. But even loathsome, stomach-turning anti-Semitism deserves a response in case gullible fans might actually believe this twisted twaddle.
Mr. Waters, the Nazis were a genocidal regime that murdered 6 million Jews. That you would have the audacity to compare Jews to monsters who murdered them shows you have no decency, you have no heart, you have no soul. The Jews of Germany did nothing to invite the aggression against them. Indeed, they were loyal citizens of a country that many of them had fought for courageously just 20 years earlier in the First World War. They did not blow up buses for political purposes. They did not send terrorists into schools to murder children. They did not preach that killing German children would get them virgins in heaven. They lived lives of humanity and decency and were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.
You have disgraced yourself by comparing the martyred 6 million, which included 1-and-a-half-million children who were gassed to death in cold blood, to Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas, whose stated intention it is to wipe Israel off the map.
The Palestinians were given endless opportunities to live with Israel in peace, including the 1936-37 Peel Commission, which partitioned the land into two states, and the U.N. partition plan of 1947, both of which gave the Arabs far more land than the Jews. The Jews accepted the offer, and the Arabs rejected it and instead dedicated themselves to Israel’s destruction. If you don’t believe me, Mr. Waters, then surely even a bigoted ignoramus like you is capable of accessing Wikipedia.
After the Arabs launched another war of annihilation against Israel in 1967, the Jews miraculously defeated four invading Arab armies and conquered huge tracts of land. Rather than practicing any kind of ethnic cleansing, Israel gave back the entire Sinai Peninsula—an area three times the size of Israel—to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty and announced that it would leave the Arabs and the Muslim Waqf in charge of the holiest site in all of Judaism, the Temple Mount. This act of accommodation has no precedent in the history of the world.
Still, Arafat’s PLO, with its declared intention of armed struggle and destroying the Zionist presence, launched terrorist outrages like the 1970 Avivim school bus massacre and the 1974 Ma’alot school massacre. Despite this, Israel never relinquished its hope that Arab leaders who were sincere about peace might arise.
In 2005, Israel voluntarily withdrew from all of Gaza. Its reward? Hamas, with its genocidal charter against Israel, was voted into power and almost immediately began launching thousands of rockets into Israel, targeting homes, schools and buses filled with children.
Muslims have every right to expect that Jews in general, and rabbis in particular, similarly condemn any acts of violence intentionally directed at any Arab civilian. We are all equally children of one God.
But Hamas is motivated not by Palestinian freedom but by hatred of Jews. Hamas’ charter continues to call for genocide against Israel and the Jewish people: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims … there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
When Hamas came to power in 2006, they channeled the billions they received as the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid into rockets rather than hospitals, bombs rather than universities. And they intentionally launch their rockets from nurseries and schools rendering the innocent Palestinian population into human shields, not surprising for an organization that regularly murders Palestinian homosexuals under the false accusation of collaboration and engages in honor killings of young Palestinian women whose only crime is to have a boyfriend.
Roger Waters’ balderdash about rabbis believing that non-Jews are subhumans is the dirtiest of blood libels and contradicts the core teachings of the Torah, which states in its very first chapter, Genesis 1, that every human being is created equally in the image of God.
And surely, even someone with as rancid a heart as Mr. Waters is familiar with what Christians call Jesus’ golden rule but which is actually found much earlier, in the Hebrew Bible, the commandment to “love your fellow man as yourself” (Leviticus 19.17), which Hillel, in the Talmud, interpreted to mean, “That which you hate do not do unto others.”
Perhaps Mr. Waters should take Hillel’s advice. Stop maligning a people who have paid a terrible price for the kind of abominable lies that people like Roger Waters unjustly hurl.
Please explain your anti-Israel is not anti-Semitic.
One can oppose the actions of the state of Israel for reasons other than animus toward Jews - just as one can oppose illegal immigration for reasons other than animus toward Latinos.
Interesting. Of course, I’ve known this for a while and while I find Waters and Gilmore reprehensible, I still listen to PF, the best stuff being from before Dark Side. I can also listen to Brian Eno although he is another MoonBat.
On the other hand, no more Ronstadt or Springsteen. Including one of my favorite combinations, the three albums of Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. No more !
And just why are you anti Isreal?
I call out people who jump from 'you criticized Israel' to 'you're anti-Semitic' because it's a false logic - and one often used against conservatives, e.g. 'You oppose illegal immigration, so you must be anti-Latino.'
Interesting. I have exactly the approach. I still listen to PF and love Dark Side and before. I don’t think about Roger Waters when I listen. But Springsteen is so annoyingly superior and preachy, it somehow comes through in voice no matter what he’s singing.
oh man...
“Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is more difficult to expose. Making the task even harder is that this hatred is advanced in the name of values most of us would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights.
“Nevertheless, we must be clear and outspoken in exposing the new anti-Semitism. I believe that we can apply a simple test – I call it the “3D” test – to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.
“The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.
“The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.
“The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.”
—Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization”
I’m in full agreement with the third D test when it actually applies. And it sometimes does; for instance, some Muslims say flat out that Israel ought not exist (usually when addressing a receptive audience, such as fellow Muslims).
The first two D tests sound plausible - demonization and double standards are logically illegitimate, and no reasonable person of good will engages in them. However, those tactics are leveled at many targets that have at best a tangential relationship to Jews and Israel: every GOP president since Reagan; pro-lifers; etc. So when those same tactics are leveled against Israel, it simply doesn’t follow that anti-Semitism is the only possible explanation - although I agree it makes that explanation more likely.
Misleading headline, Waters was no longer in PF and therefore the headline misleads readers.
True. But these days I’m amazed when a headline actually describes the article it headlines.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.