Get Me Rewrite: According to the Foggy Bottom Boys, Roger Waters is ‘Deeply Offensive to Jewish People’

Roger Waters is now the world’s best-known antisemite. He must be very proud. He was wearing his antisemitism on his sleeve during the German part of his “Farewell Tour” (a “farewell” that for many of us can’t come fast enough) as he pranced on stage in various German cities, dressed in an SS uniform, and above the stage, he had the names of Anne Frank and Shireen Abu Akleh, in giant letters, side by side, thereby likening the deliberate Nazi murder of the 14-year-old Dutch girl in Bergen-Belsen to the accidental killing of a Palestinian journalist who had been standing close to a firefight just outside Jenin between IDF soldiers and Palestinian terrorists, when she was hit, as both the Israeli and American governments in separate investigations have concluded, unintentionally, by an Israeli bullet. “US calls Roger Waters performance in Berlin ‘deeply offensive to Jewish people,'” Reuters, June 6, 2023:

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday weighed in on a controversy over a performance by Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, denouncing the show in Berlin as “deeply offensive to Jewish people” and accusing Waters of having a record of using antisemitic tropes.

Waters, 79, has said the performance last month, during which he wore a black trench coat with a swastika-like emblem, was a statement against fascism, injustice and bigotry and called criticism of it “disingenuous and politically motivated.”

Berlin police said they were investigating Waters on suspicion of “incitement of the people.”…

Images from the May 17 concert showed the famed singer and bass player aiming an imitation machine gun into the audience as he recreated scenes from a film based on Pink Floyd’s hit 1979 album “The Wall,” a critique of fascism.

And overhead floated the huge inflatable pig, with a Star of David fixed to its side. He’s been using that “Jewish pig” since 2013; it’s his favorite prop. Could he be semaphoring something?

Waters has been peddling his antisemitism/anti-Zionism at least for the past decade. In 2013, he compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany, saying: “The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious.” He said the reason why few celebrities had joined the BDS movement in the United States was because “the Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here [in the US] and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry.” In 2015, Waters published an open letter in Salon criticizing Bon Jovi for performing in Tel Aviv. In 2017, he urged Radiohead to cancel a concert there, signing a letter with 50 others, and then signed another open letter asking Nick Cave to cancel his. Neither Radiohead nor Cave complied. He hasn’t had much success with other performers since. But give him this: he’s trying his level best to harm the Jewish state and its people in any way he can.

Waters narrated the 2016 documentary The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States, about the methods supposedly used by Israel to shape American public opinion. In other words, he is obsessively, pathologically anti-Israel, which he continually compares either to South Africa, because of what he calls its practice of “apartheid,” or more often, to Nazi Germany, not just because of what he calls Israel’s practice of the “Big Lie” that was first perfected by Joseph Goebbels, but because of how it treats the Palestinians.

In a 2017 interview with Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of BDS, Waters again likened Israel’s public diplomacy to Nazi Germany: “The thing about propaganda – again, it’s not hard to go back to Goebbels or the 1930s. You understand the tactic is to tell the big lie as often as possible over and over and over and over again. And people believe it.”

He also repeats his 2013 claim that the “parallels” between Nazi Germany and Israel are “blindingly obvious.” Yes, Roger Waters, we all remember the mass killings of Palestinians by Israel: the gas chambers with Zyklon-B, the mobile killing vans, the crematoria into which Palestinians, are thrust by the IDF, the open pits where Palestinians are shot in the back of their heads, one bullet for each, and then, just like the Nazis with the Jews, they topple into those pits, and are then covered with dirt, even with some of them still alive. Strange, isn’t it, that the Jews have been mass murdering Palestinians for decades but the Arab population of Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank has gone from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7 million today. Genocide, Roger? What genocide?

Back on the stage in London after the German part of his “This Is Not A Drill” tour was over, Waters started his show by claiming to the crowd that “they are trying to cancel me.” The charge was absurd. He was appearing two nights running at the most desirable venue for rock music in London. No one was trying to “cancel” him. But he still feels sorry for himself: “And it hurts. We’ve done 80 shows and we’ve done nothing but share our love for people. That’s why I’m so pissed off with this Israeli lobby bullshit.” He also accused his critics of “making up stuff because you’ve been told to by your masters from the Foreign Office in Tel Aviv.”

And who is “they” who are “trying to cancel me”? Waters knows: it is the.people who control the music industry, control the media, control the world – that is, the Jews. It was the late Sheldon Adelson, Waters has claimed, who pulled all the strings. How is It that, given his immense power, Adelson wasn’t ever able to control Roger Waters? Waters hasn’t yet revealed the. identity of Adelson’s successor as Jewish Puppetmaster of the World. But he will. Give him time.

Amazing how powerful “they” are, yet “they” have been unable to prevent the Jewish state from being denounced endlessly at the UN, with more resolutions against Israel being voted on than against all other nations put together, and unable as well to prevent the establishment of several bodies at the UN devoted solely to monitoring the supposed mistreatment of the Palestinians by Israel. Those masters of the universe are unable even to prevent Roger Waters from spewing his antisemitic bile wherever and whenever he wants.

But there is one last matter that needs to be taken up with the Foggy Bottom Boys. After Roger Waters appeared in his Nazi drag in his two shows in Berlin, the EU’s antisemitism envoy Katharina von Schnurbein wrote “I am sick and disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialise the Shoah and the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis. In Germany. Enough is enough.”

In response, Deborah Lipstadt, the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, tweeted that she agreed with von Schnurbein’s “condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.”

The State Department then issued its own statement, emailed urbi et orbi, about Roger Waters: “The concert in question, which took place in Berlin, contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimised the Holocaust. The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”

I found three words in that email – “to Jewish people” – offensive, though not deeply so. Can it really be the State Department’s position that Roger Waters is “deeply offensive” only “to Jewish people”? Does that mean the rest of us aren’t offended by Waters? For that is how that statement comes across. Can the State Department kindly amend its statement, and tell the world that “what we should have said is that ‘the performance of Roger Waters in Berlin, where he pranced about as an SS-man, while an inflatable pig balloon with a Star of David affixed floated above him, minimized the Holocaust and was deeply offensive to all people of sense.’”

There. Isn’t that better?