A Final Word On Roger Waters

Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and veteran of half-a-dozen other conflicts, has long been known for his defense of the IDF, which he has described as the “most moral army in the world” because, among other reasons, of the enormous efforts it takes to avoid civilian casualties. Unsurprisingly, Colonel Kemp is also quick to detect, and to denounce, the squalid manifestations of antisemitism among those both high and low. He has now taken a well-deserved whack at the atrocious Roger Waters, at his “This Is Not A Drill” appearance – part of his “final farewell tour”— in Berlin, where he appeared, after the intermission, dressed as an SS-man while firing a pretend Shmeisser machine gun at the real audience. And throughout the entire performance, there floated above the stage a huge inflatable pig with a Star of David affixed to its side, and above Waters’ head appeared giant-sized letters that spelled out two names: “Shireen Abu Akhleh” and “Anne Frank.” More of Kemp’s evisceration of Waters can be found here: “While playing Nazi dress-up, Roger Waters decries antisemitic branding,” by Colonel Richard Kemp, Ynet News, May 28, 2023:

Waters’ deliberate implication was that Jews murdered Abu Akleh as Nazis murdered Anne Frank. The fact is that nobody knows whether Abu Akleh was the victim of IDF or Palestinian terrorist bullets. And indeed if it was the former it would certainly have been accidental, the farthest possible cry from the calculated way Anne Frank met her end at the hands of the German killing industry.

In every way, the circumstances of the two women’s deaths were utterly different and only a hate-filled rabble-rousing propagandist could dream up any comparison. Abu Akleh clearly did not deserve to die, but she went to Jenin of her own volition and in search of violence, whereas Anne Frank hardly volunteered to spend two years hidden in an attic in Amsterdam, in daily fear for her life, before making her final journey to Belsen.

The IDF has said, and the Americans agree, that it is “likely” that an IDF bullet killed Abu Akleh, but that there was certainly “no intention” to kill her. And indeed, it would have made no sense for the IDF to kill her; that could only harm Israel in the eyes of the world.

Waters of course has a long and vitriol-fueled track record of Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing. Magistrates in Frankfurt who tried to ban his concert there accused him of being “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world”.

Waters has bizarrely taken to claiming that the court in Frankfurt declared that he, Roger Waters, “is not an antisemite.” That court did no such thing. It merely said that it could not see that he was “glorifying or qualifying Nazi deeds or identifying with Nazi racial ideology.” Nor was there any indication that he would be using any type of Nazi propaganda during the concert. But that decision was handed down before Rogers put on that SS uniform. The court would surely see that Waters wearing an SS uniform was indeed “glorifying…Nazi deeds” and “using [a] type of Nazi propaganda.”

He takes every possible opportunity to spread lies and distortions about Israel and uses a massive media platform to amplify his prejudiced and defamatory message. As the BBC reported, he “has also floated an inflatable pig marked with the Star of David at his concerts.”

Not content with his own petty boycott of Israel (although I doubt many Israelis would want to see him there anyway) he has been aggressive in trying to persuade other performers to keep away and then publicly vilified those who treat his admonitions with the contempt they deserve. That includes the Rolling Stones.

I was there when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards defied Waters by making their Holy Land debut at HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv a few years ago — the Israelis loved them and it was plain to see they loved the Israelis. Waters must have been furious.

Waters denies being antisemitic, professing instead to be a defender of freedom and human rights. He blames the “Israel lobby” for the complaints against him. It seems he has been taking lessons from Jeremy Corbyn who made exactly the same claims while dragging his Labour Party into its darkest depths of antisemitism and was later expelled for refusing to accept the damning findings of an inquiry into the party’s bigotry.

In another echo of Corbyn, Waters, the self-styled “anti-fascist”, has openly justified the actions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the nearest thing we have in Europe to fascism today, with its internal repression, imprisonment of dissidents, stranglehold on the press, wars of aggression, lust for Lebensraum, torture chambers, killing centers, mass graves and industrial scale child abduction. In a speech at the UN in February, at Russia’s invitation, he claimed that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had been “provoked” by the West, and after the invasion berated President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife in an open letter, telling her that “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine “have set your country on the path to this disastrous war.”

Waters is not only an obsessive antisemite, but he’s also one of the few people in the Western world who have embraced Vladimir Putin, and willingly spreads Putin’s propaganda that Ukraine “provoked” the war that began with a massive invasion by close to 200,000 Russian troops on February 24, 2022.

Waters’ craven justification of the Russian war, as well as his antisemitic stance, have been met with publicly expressed contempt even by members of his former band.

Kemp’s reference here is to the wife of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, Polly Samson, who wrote songs for the group before its breakup, but whose most famous words, that will entitle her to immortality in the annals of invective, were contained in her February 6 tweet directed at Roger Waters: “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.”

I suspect Waters’ father, too, would have found his son’s behaviour contemptible. Eric Waters, having originally secured exemption from compulsory military service as a conscientious objector, went on to voluntarily put his life on the line to fight Nazism as an infantryman in the Royal Fusiliers. He was killed in action at Anzio in 1944….

This poignant fact, which many of us had not known, is about Roger Waters’ father, Eric, who might have kept out of World War II, having been exempted from service as a conscientious objector, but instead chose to serve and was killed in action. He would have been horrified, Colonel Kemp suggests, at how his son turned out, prancing about on stage in the uniform of the very Nazis Eric Waters had died fighting. Kemp’s comment ought to cut Roger Waters to the quick, but it won’t. He cannot be reached by any criticism; he is in the grip of an obsessive antisemitism.

Waters is the main culprit, but what about his helpers? As Colonel Kemp says, they, too, are aiders and abetters of Waters’ antisemitism. Who, as part of his crew, donned Nazi helmets and “escorted” SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Waters to the stage? Who inflated the “Jewish” pig and painted the Star of David on it and set it afloat? Who raised high the jumbotron? Who put above the stage the gigantic letters spelling the names “Shireen Abu Akleh” and “Anne Frank” side by side? How many people were directly involved in mounting the spectacle for Roger Waters? And who were all those thousands of his hysterical fans screaming with delight at this display, instead of booing and walking out in horror?