Jason Kempin, Getty Amid pressure from a Jewish group, a cultural center in…
Roger Waters Is 'Against' Israel, Calls for Musician Boycott and Attacks 'Illegal' Wall
- Posted on Mar 7th 2011 10:31AM by Jason MacNeil
Dr. Billy Ingram, WireImage.com
"I'm against Israel for exactly the same reasons that I was against South Africa: it's a two-tiered racist system," Waters told Al Jazeera's Riz Khan in an interview last week which was later posted on YouTube. "They have pass books, they have to carry identity cards that say whether they're a Jew or an Arab. It's insane."
Waters said he wrote the piece with the goal of placing it in either the New York Times or The Guardian.
"It's me calling on my fellow musicians and artists to join the BDS campaign against Israel," Waters said. "I've finally decided to put my head above the parapet. Enough is enough.
"They pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians and there's lots of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution. But in the meantime they're throwing people out of their homes in the Negev and East Jerusalem and they're annexing huge parts of the West Bank. So all this talk about... they're quietly getting on with taking over the whole of the land. And what happens then to the Palestinians?"
In the roughly 25-minute interview, which touches briefly on Waters ongoing world tour of Pink Floyd's classic album 'The Wall,' the singer also stated that if the Israeli government wants to build a protective wall around the country "they should build a wall along the 1967 border."
"One might put one's hands up and say, 'How sad is that?' But if that's what they want to do, who are we to tell them they shouldn't? But that's not where they're building the wall, they're building the wall 900 kilometers all around the West Bank, and they are annexing the territory they occupied back in 1967. That is what the world community considers illegal and that is why there is a movement against it that is prepared to stand up and say, 'No, this is wrong. This is illegal, immoral, oppressive and repressive.'"
Waters also stated there is a general movement of refusal taking place within in the country to show displeasure with the government policy, as he understands it after speaking with Israeli friends.
"They disapprove of their country's foreign policies, but also many thousands of Israelis who believe that their government's policies are repressive and racist and colonialist and imperialists and wrong, and are fighting against them," he said.
"So any one of us from outside Israel who thinks that Israeli policy is wrong, we're not anti-Semitic and we're not against Israelis. In fact, we applaud those whose humanity transcends both their religion and nationalistic fervor that they might regress to. I think we're all human, first, and that any movement towards a nationalistic and jingoistic attitude is a regression to something that is actually beneath us."
In 2006, Waters moved a concert slated for Tel Aviv to the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam to show his displeasure. But Waters also closed the interview by stating that if the wall separating Palestinians and Israelis were torn down, he could definitely see himself -- as he did in 1990 following the collapse of the Berlin Wall -- performing there.
- Filed under: News
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Finally ! Thank you so much Roger for taking a stand. I dont understand how/ why these plain simple facts are not more widely understood and discussed.
February 08 2013 at 6:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyyes that's until Israel pays him to play there. lol he did a huge concert there a few years ago but I guess Israeli money is ok right ? he's a fake, just trying to look good for the media
October 05 2011 at 8:06 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply
Roger Waters Rules
Good on him for standing up to what he beleives in. At least he is not a sheep like millions of other people on earth!
On another note I just signed up to see Roger Waters live in Australia. :)
http://preferredseating.com.au/vip/waitlistitem/780/roger-waters/
Roger Waters Rules
Good on him for standing up to what he beleives in. You don't have to be a sheep and follow the thousands of other moroons backing Israel.
I can't wait for Roger waters to come to Australia I just bought tickets :)
http://preferredseating.com.au/vip/waitlistitem/780/roger-waters/
Ham Bone
Stick to your music, Rog (preferably written by Gilmour).
May 19 2011 at 6:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply
Jake
oH jEEBUS...........Did you copy your propoganda all by yourself from some website funded by Saudi Arabia ?
March 19 2011 at 6:20 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply
Jake
Roger baby,
Funny how you don't boycott Saudi Arabia and 17 other Arab countrys.
Do the Christian Copts mean nothing in Egypt ?
Do the 850,000 Jews booted out of their homeland in the Arab world who were there before Islam mean notta ?
Why did you not complain when Israel offered 96.7 % of everything and the rest to be negotiated when Bill Clinton was around and Arafat the "Nobel Peace" recepiant (good one) chose Intifada because he did not want to lose the only thing he was good at.
Ask Bill yourself Roger Dodger.
A Nizami
Well Israelis are racists.
They kill many palestinian women and children.
Yet with the big media they have and the Hollywood Jews they turn their victims into terrorist monsters.
Just read:
Eitan
Mr. Waters lives on a island in the North Atlantic, but most countries have things called "borders" with checkpoints (viz. US-Canada), fences (viz. Russia-Finland), even land mines between them (viz. Uzbekistan). The Chinese also built a wall, to keep out Mongol invaders (perhaps you lot heard about it whilst force-feeding them opium). The Israelis apparently did the same when their concessions at Oslo were greeted by the mass murder of thousands of citizens. The security fence replaced an inconvenient system of checkpoints that allows Palestinians faster entry to Israel. Also, the Arabs of Umm al-Fahm are happy that car thieves from Jenin cannot commit crimes in their town. So on whose behalf does Mr. Waters speak? Islamic Jihad's behalf? Is it not deceitful for him to complain that Palestinians should go through the same metal detectors that Israelis go through every day at shopping malls, thanks to Hamas and Tanzim's attacks?
There is continuity between British opinion today, espoused by Mr. Waters, and policy during the Mandatory period, and it is all driven by racism. Today, Jewish residence in such towns as Hebron is deemed "illegal," in spite of the 1929 ethnic cleansing of Jews from Hebron and land purchases predating 1948, whereas Palestinians have openly violated the Oslo Peace Accords by building their own "settlements" throughout Area C. A Samarian cannot reach the charred remains of that community's synagogues in Shechem/Neapolis/Nablus without risking lyching. And the demands to tear down the security fence amount to a call for a single-state solution with no borders, contrary to the PLO/PA's own pronouncements. During the Mandate, Britain transferred all state land free of charge to Hawrani Bedouins from Jordan, prohibited Jewish land purchases on 95% of Palestine's territory, and required that Jews pay indemnities equaling 20 years of income to Arab tenant farmers, long after the landowner had sold his holdings. The British contrived to interdict and send back Jews fleeing Hitler, refused to save 500,000 Hungarian Jews from Eichmann, and even set up concentration camps in Palestine for concentration camp victims. His Majesty's government thus forced hundreds of thousands of European Jews to the gas chambers in the name of public opinion in Baghdad and Cairo, and if that weren't enough, troops garrisoned in the Mandate transferred their weapons to the Arabs to prevent Israel for seeking independence. Lest this all be viewed as a mere novelty, let's also mention that England is responsible for Richard the Lionheart's mass murder of Jews during the Crusades, claiming some 300,000 lives in what is now Israel. Given this, it is abundantly clear that the English will steal any pretext to hasten the elimination of the Jews - Mr. Waters' plan is to make Israelis defenseless from Palestinians, as during the Second Intifada's wave of suicide bombings. I hope that Britain receives the same treatment. The Guardian's focus on the Palestinians to the exclusion of national aspirations by the far more numerous Kurds, Western Saharans, and other groups without $8 billion in aid to play with, merely make this prejudice and vision of a racially "pure" Holy Land more evident. Your concepts of legality and "humanitarianism" are all shams intended to kill Jews - it's just that cognitive dissonance, and your feckless concern for the 22nd Arab state, make you blind to this atavistic, homocidal tendency of the Anglos.
Israel has weathered blockades, boycotts, slaughters at nurseries, and the military might of the Soviet Union and her allies. It will weather racism cloaked as "human rights." Mr. Waters should stay on his silly island.
Remember Arabs are semites too !
1 reply to Remember Arabs are semites too !'s comment
It's heart warming to see that even to rock artists the racist, discriminatory, illegal, criminal and anti human practises of the 'state' of Isreal are so evident. After all it is the single one 'country' on earth whose all, both current & former, prime ministes are internationally wanted for war crimes & crimes against humanity. So what else would one expect Israelis to be like? I mean if the majority of their population elects representing officials who are constinously wanted one after the other by International war tribunals?? what does this say about the majority of the Israeli population?!
Mr. Waters statements are really understatment to say the least.
For those using the holocaust & the historical discrimination against jews to justify Isreal's practises against the Palestinians, please don't bother...the excuse is just ridiculous as if those wrongs make this wrong a right, instead jews should therefore be the most sensitive people on earth toward human suffering but instead they in Israel not only practise it but also encourage & justify it. Look up similar opinions by world wide renowned thinkers such as Naom Chomsky a jew himself repeatedly accusing Israel of war against humanity in articles such as http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20080226.htm
Oh & don't bother calling me an anti-semite cause by definition a semite is a member of the people of semetic race, namely Arabs & hebrews so you'd be silly to call my view so just as you'd be silly to say something like the jews killed Jesus Christ because of the suffering they underwent, cause if memory serves me well back then the holocaust hadn't happened yet.
Jake
Chomsky ?
Might as well be Joseph Goebel
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