During a Berlin concert on Wednesday, former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters likened Anne Frank to Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who died during a shootout between IDF soldiers and Palestinian terrorists.
Waters also dressed up as an SS soldier and pretended to fire a rifle.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry tweeted on Thursday, “Good morning to every one but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”
Good morning to every one but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/lS1YzpUZzM
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) May 24, 2023
In February, the German city of Frankfurt announced the cancellation of a May 28 concert by Waters, citing his reputation as “one of the world’s best-known antisemites.”
A statement by the municipal government announcing the decision cited his support for the BDS movement, antisemitic imagery at his performances and past interviews with media affiliated with the Hamas terrorist group.
The city also noted that Waters’s concert was set to be staged at the publicly-owned Festhalle venue, where 3,000 Jews were detained and later deported to concentration camps following the Nov. 9-10, 1938, Kristallnacht pogroms, which historians view as a prelude to the Nazi genocide.
Waters has a long history of antisemitic behavior, claiming in October 2022 that the Jewish state was attempting to manufacture a new intifada with the goal of killing as many Palestinians as possible.
“The Israelis seem now to have a policy of murdering so many of them, that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada, so they can make it an armed conflict where they’re a thousand times, 10,000 times more powerful than the Palestinian people … so they can just kill them all,” Waters said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Waters also called Hamas the “democratically elected government of Gaza,” acknowledging the existence of its “armed wing” yet justifying the Palestinians’ “absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation” and then minimizing the impact of their rocket attacks against Israel. The rockets “almost never do any damage because they’re very ineffectual,” he said.
Earlier this month, Pink Floyd member David Gilmour and his wife, Polly Samson, publicly accused Waters of antisemitism, setting off a widely publicized feud.
“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,” wrote Samson.
