The Ten Worst Purveyors of Antisemitism Worldwide, No. 9: Roger Waters
Legendary English rocker Roger Waters, born in 1943, cofounded the iconic group Pink Floyd in 1965 and stayed in it until 1985. Since then, while sometimes reuniting with other Pink Floyd members, he’s mainly pursued a solo career.
Waters is a pop star on a gigantic scale. Pink Floyd, for which he was the main songwriter, has sold over 250 million albums across the globe. Waters’s worldwide tour The Wall Live, which he began in 2010, sold over 1.4 million tickets in the first half of 2012, making it the international leader for all categories of concerts.
Like many pop stars, Waters has taken up causes. In 2009 he called the Israeli security fence in the West Bank an “obscenity” that “should be torn down.” He never got around to criticizing the waves of Palestinian suicide bombings and other terror attacks, which killed 1500 Israelis and wounded many thousands more, that prompted the building of the fence in the first place.
In 2011 Waters announced he had joined the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Consisting of Palestinian NGOs and leftist supporters, BDS favors a “one-state solution” whereby Israel would cease to exist.
Waters has been quite active in BDS. In a November 2012 speech to the UN he accused Israel—a member of the exclusively democrat OECD and rated a “Free” country by Freedom House—of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “international crimes.” Last August he published an open letter calling on other musicians to “declare a cultural boycott on Israel,” citing Stevie Wonder’s cancellation of a concert in Israel as a success story.
Waters, it goes without saying, does not call for a boycott of any other country on the globe. He has recently played concerts in human rights beacons like Russia, China, and Turkey without raising a peep of protest. Does all this—not least the scurrilous claim of “apartheid”—qualify him as an antisemite? In general, the Jewish world gave him the benefit of the doubt and refrained from making that charge.
That is, until an incident last July.












It is especially appropriate that the author invoked the Middle Ages, as modern liberalism is founded on the notion of indulgences. All sins can be forgiven--even if you don't repent!--so long as you pay the proper fee to the gatekeepers.
My musical life really started off with maternally-mandated piano lessons in the third grade. My teacher, Sister Frances de Chantal, probably earned her way into the Heavenly Academy of Music Teachers based on her inextinguishable patience for my inanities and inabilities. For five years or so, she guided me, slowly but surely, into the classical canon which resulted in my musical tastes being for longer form, non-lyrical compositions.
I first came upon Pink Floyd early one Saturday morning when, coming home from a festive night out, I flicked on the TV to see them performing on the local PBS station. They were playing "One of These Days" (...I'm going to cut you into little pieces.) while in the background there was a video of a crop duster doing its thing. I was hooked and the next day, I got a copy of their album "Meddle" which included the magisterial, 23-minute, whole side of the LP "Echoes". From there, I kind of worked backwards especially to "Umma Gumma". Many of those pieces, such as "Be Careful with That Axe, Eugene", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", and "Astromine Domine" pleased me primarily because of the paucity of lyrics and their extended length. Again, my classical music residuals had resurfaced.
As I continued to follow the group's musical outputs, I never paid all that much attention to their lyrics. I knew they saying something or other, but I had survived some serious parenting and was in no danger, at anytime, of confusing Roger Waters with St. Thomas Aquinas. While the group achieved great popularity after Sid Barrett's early demise, (and "The Great Gig in the Sky" is certainly one of my all time favorite songs) I still think that its best work was prior to its superstardom. I still enjoy the later work from time to time, but the early pieces strike a much deeper chord.
As to Roger Waters’ politics, well, I would prefer that they be other than what you report, but, in the end, I'm only into him for the music.
That's why they are capable of entertaining massive double standards about selling slaves as opposed to buying them, Arab colonization as opposed to British, Kurdish Turks as opposed to Palestinians, the founding of nations, etc.
Politically correct liberals are therefore incapable of making even the simplest comparisons. If they were baseball umpires they'd be calling strikes for gays, balls for blacks, foul balls for women, etc. In effect, that's what they do in their daily lives, and why they are a train wreck completely out of touch with simple daily reality.
In desolate sidings the poppies entwine
With cattle trucks lying in wait for the next time
(Your Possible Pasts, by Waters)
is busy getting those cattle trucks ready, or at least encouraging others to do so.
But he is.