The German city of Frankfurt announced on Friday the cancellation of a May 28 concert by former Pink Floyd member Roger 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 terror group.
Waters has a long history of antisemitic behavior, claiming in October that the Jewish state was attempting to manufacture a new intifada with the ultimate 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.
Waters also called the Hamas terrorist group the “democratically elected government of Gaza,” acknowledging the existence of an “armed wing” of Hamas 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.
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.
— pollysamson (@PollySamson) February 6, 2023
In July, Waters bashed Israel as the byproduct of the “settler-colonialists, Zionist movement” during an online program to support pro-Palestinian students at McGill University in Canada.
“At the turn of the millennium, I had no idea really what was going on,” said Waters. “I thought, Israel, isn’t that people in sandals going around and you know, farming, and aren’t they socialists. ... I was completely wrong. It’s not about that at all.
“It’s about a bunch of, you know, Europeans back in the middle of the 19th century deciding that they were going to take over this piece of land, and kick out anybody that lived there and take it over for themselves and for their own little cabal,” he continued.
Five or six years ago, said Waters, one couldn’t use the word “apartheid” in reference to the “Zionist agenda.” You couldn’t do it, it was absolutely verboten,” he added, using the German word for “forbidden.”
“Now,” he continued, “It’s impossible to have any conversation about the Zionist project in Palestine without using the word apartheid because it has become generally accepted by anyone with an IQ above room temperature or anyone who has any knowledge at all about the situation in the occupied territories.”
In its announcement Friday, the city of Frankfurt 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 many historians view as a prelude to the WWII Nazi genocide.
