By David E. Kaplan
Pink Floyd Experience, a tribute band to the British rock group, canceled three shows in Israel after Roger Waters – the former lead singer of rock band Pink Floyd and BDS’s high-profile flagbearer – pressured the cover band to cancel its shows in Israel. The band was scheduled to perform in the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba in early January 2019.
He has no shame in lying in his explanation which he posted online:
“To sing my songs in front of segregated audiences in Israel and contribute to the cultural whitewashing of the racist and apartheid government of that country, would be an act of unconscionable malice and disrespect.
“The people you intend to entertain are executing their neighbor’s children, shooting them down in cold blood every day. In the name of everything human, PLEASE hear my plea and cancel today.”
The tribute band canceled its shows a few hours after Waters’ post.
I loved and still love Roger Waters’ brilliant music. It was difficult not to as a student in the seventies!
So, without denying the impact of Pink Floyd on Rock culture and society, today, when I hear Water’s magnum opus, “The Wall”, I think he may be “off the wall”.
Or worse!
While the messages in Pink Floyd’s lyrics were at times subliminal, the messages today from the band’s co-founder and chief song-writer is clear – to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel. It is reminiscent of another of his concept albums – ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. There is something “dark” about Waters today the way he obsessively supports BDS – whose aim is the destruction of the only Jewish state.
This is what he actively supports despite his protestations that he is not an anti-Semite!
Troubled Waters
This “Dark Side”, evident in influential figures throughout history, has a name: it’s called anti-Semitism.
Let us reflect on a few:
- Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator wrote:
“The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers.”
- While many are familiar with the anti-Semitism of the composer Richard Wagner, his no less illustrious father-in-law, Franz Liszt had this to say:
“The day will come when all nations amidst which the Jews are dwelling will have to raise the question of their wholesale expulsion, a question which will be one of life or death, good health or chronic disease, peaceful existence or perpetual social fever.”
- And what of US President Ulysses S. Grant, who 1862, in the heat of the Civil War fighting against slavery, issued Order No. 11, expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. He explained that the measure amounted to “special regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated….mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders.”
- While we may be comfortable reclining in a Ford sedan, who can be comfortable with the words of the company’s founder Henry Ford when he said in 1921: “Jews have always controlled the business… The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada . . . is exclusively under the control – moral and financial of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.”
And what of our 20th century writers, whose works we cherish like – Roald Dahl, H.G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw:
- Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s book author, expressed that “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity….even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
– the British writer H.G. Wells had a lot to say on the subject. In the Anatomy of Freedom, he writes: “Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to assimilate. If the Jews have suffered, it is because they have regarded themselves as a chosen people.”
In a 1933 letter he pens: “A careful study of anti-Semitism prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not adequately realize the irritations they inflict.”
Of course, persecution of the Jews is not the fault of the persecutor but the persecuted according to Well’s, who in private correspondence labeled Karl Marx “a shallow third-rate Jew,” and “a lousy Jew”.
- The wondrous writer of Pygmalion, transformed into one of the most beloved musicals of all times – “My Fair Lady”, Georg Bernard Shaw expressed in the London Morning Post, December 3, 1925:
“This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew. This craving for bouquets by Jews is a symptom of racial degeneration.”
As Israel celebrated last year, the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, it is sad to recall the words of Shaw in the Literary Digest, October 12, 1932:
“The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race – chosen by the late Lord Balfour – can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.”
In other words, according to Shaw, Jews were not “human beings”!
Is it not this belief of Shaw that only a few years later led to the “Final Solution”?
Come Hell or High Waters
And joining this august company is Roger Waters on a ‘crusade’ to silent Israeli artists and to sabotage any international artists performing in Israel.
Not sufficient that Israel is surrounded by enemies that want little more than its physical annihilation, Waters now is hell-bent on its cultural obliteration.
- Is he calling for cultural boycotts of Syria that remains responsible for wholesale murder and mayhem or of its complicit backers Russia and Iran, that have left over half a million dead, and many million refuges?
- Is he calling for boycotts for some the world’s other major human rights violators such as Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Myanmar, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan and Afghanistan?
Of course not!
Only Israel is “chosen”, a word that H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw so connivingly ridicule. Waters happily adds his voice in this anti-Semitic chorus that periodically reaches fiendish crescendos that that end up as ‘Inquisitions’, ‘pogroms’ and ‘concentration camps’.
Next up for Waters: the destruction of the State of Israel.
Is it a surprise why Jews not only need an Israel, but a strong Israel – an Israel that can defend itself and deter others seeking its destruction?
Durban Disaster
With BDS crediting its genesis to the 2001 Conference against racism in Durban, South Africans should be aware of this organisation’s real agenda.
Apart from harassing international artists to cancel their shows in Israel, they bully and threaten Palestinians who wish to engage with Israelis.
This happened recently when it caused a conference at Stellenbosch University in November 2018, to cancel a delegation of seven Israeli academics from three universities, including a Palestinian Professor, Mohammed Dajani.
Omar Barghouti, a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and a co-founder of BDS refuses to engage with Israelis. He accuses Palestinians who do of displaying “moral blindness,” calling them “clinically delusional”.
Mohammed Suleiman Dajani, who founded the Wasatia, a “Muslim moderate” movement in Palestine in 2007, descends from a well-known Palestinian family. His great grandfather Sheikh Ahmad Dajani (1459-1561) was appointed by the Ottoman Sultan as the custodian for the King David Tomb in Jerusalem.
As Dajani writes in an exclusive with Lay Of The Land (LOTL), “I have endured my fair share of criticism as an academic but never have I had my credibility or identity as a Palestinian doubted before. To accuse me of not being a “genuine Palestinian” because I seek peace and engage with Israelis or Jewish communities around the world is extraordinarily myopic and one can see how preposterous it is for an organization that says it is concerned with human rights to be so set against dialogue and reconciliation.”
The Writing is on ‘The Wall’
What is happening today in South Africa by fomenting a culture of hate against Israelis and Israeli-born visitors – trying to bar them from South African campuses – is reminiscent of the “Judenrein” policies of the not so distant past. Note the proposal put forward in September 2017 by the Palestine Solidarity Forum, calling on UCT to implement an academic boycott of Israeli universities. “This academic boycott would require that UCT reject forming any institutional ties with Israeli universities.”
These universities are losing their moral high ground and can no longer claim to be bastions of free speech.
From Richard to Roger
Despite Waters trying to whitewash BDS members as “human rights activists” they are nothing more than a band of bullies.
Its aim is not to seek a SOLUTION but a DISSOLUTION – the dissolution of the State of Israel.
Listen to BDS’s founder Omar Barghouti who says, “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine,” referring to all of Israel. He chooses his words carefully when he says:
“To have a Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel.”
This is ‘music to the ears’ of anti-Semites and might explain why Israel is hardly partial to the sounds of Richard Wagner nor to the rantings of Roger Waters.
Israel can do very nicely without either!
