“Roger Waters is a raving antisemite and a bigot. Calling me racist is an inversion of reality,” Canadian-Israeli businessman and philanthropist Sylvan Adams told JNS on Wednesday.
English musician Waters recently published an opinion piece in far-left Canadian news site Rabble.ca titled “Sylvan Adams leave the kids alone,” in which he labeled the philanthropist a “looney Zionist billionaire” and a “racist supremacist.”
“He accuses me of being a Zionist—guilty as charged. I am a Zionist, thank you, Roger, for noticing,” Adams retorted, speaking via Zoom.
Over the last decade, Adams has served as an unofficial ambassador for Israel around the globe.
In the aftermath of the Hamas onslaught in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Adams donated $100 million to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva to strengthen the south. He visited Gaza border communities, where he announced investments to build cycling and sports infrastructure in the region.
The owner of the Israel-Premier Tech UCI professional cycling team, Adams also organized a mass ride to commemorate victims of the Oct. 7 attacks and to call for the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
Adams had recently revealed intentions to have the Pink Floyd English rock band, minus Waters who left the group in 1985, headline a commemorative concert at the site of the Supernova music festival massacre for those murdered by Hamas.
In response, Waters, who in July denied that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women on Oct. 7, 2023, accused Adams of “whitewash[ing] Israeli apartheid.”
In his op-ed, Waters wrote: “You couldn’t make this up, but you don’t have to because it’s happening. Sylvan Adams, a looney Zionist billionaire, unknown outside a circle of funders of McGill University in Montreal, thinks he can reunite Pink Floyd to promote and celebrate the genocide of the Palestinian people. Hmmm?”
Waters accused Adams and Deep Saini, president of McGill, of demonstrating “total indifference to Palestinian suffering.”
“I wish him the worst possible luck in the world in his attempts to suborn the name Pink Floyd, a name I am proud to have helped create, to celebrate the obscene horrors that the state he is so proud to represent has wreaked upon this our hapless world,” Waters wrote.
Adams told JNS that he did not believe the article came from Waters.
“There is a worldwide group of haters that are organized and paid by the governments of Qatar, Iran and more recently China. It started in the case of Qatar, 20 years ago with Al Jazeera, which is a hateful, anti-Israel, antisemitic propaganda network,” he said.
“Their office in Canada probably heard me mention my plan to ask Pink Floyd, from which Waters was kicked out, to come out of retirement and sing at a commemorative concert for the victims of Oct. 7,” he continued.
“Waters is manufacturing pure hatred and I believe that he is being paid for it. Don’t get me wrong, he is an antisemite and he enjoys his work, but he is being paid. He lent his name to this online article by a Canadian publication that I had never heard of,” Adams told JNS.
The opinion piece, Adams said, is part of an organized assault on the Jewish state and its allies.
“I am a Zionist. I am proud of it, I am proud of the journey of our people, proud of our return to our indigenous land, proud to be an Israeli and proud of the contributions we make to the rest of the world,” Adams said.
“It’s a moral inversion to throw accusations at me and the State of Israel who is fighting this war on behalf of all of Western civilization against horrible terrorists that want to tear down not only Israel but all of Western civilization,” he continued.
“I say to myself if I’ve got the attention of some of these groups, I must be doing something right,” he said.
Adams explained that he picked Pink Floyd for the concert to show the contrast between Waters and his former bandmates who have disavowed him.
“I would love to create this event and for the headliners to be Bono and U2 together with Pink Floyd. Both are massive bands, to do it pro bono, come to Israel to honor our youth who were so cruelly and savagely cut down and play this beautiful benefit concert,” Adams said.
The concert will, however, have to wait until Israel’s current war ends. “We are at war with at least two enemies on arguably seven fronts. This is not the time to hold a concert, it’s not the right moment. Until the wars wind down and until our security situation is resolved, we can’t consider it,” he said.
“I am hopeful that eventually the wars will wind down and we will not compromise. It would be a shame to have sacrificed 800 soldiers, 800 of our best people, and eventually return to the dangerous situation that we faced on Oct. 6, [2023],” he added.
Adams said it is the time for Israel to deal with Iran as the United States prepares to welcome an administration with unapologetically pro-Israel Cabinet members.
“We need to deal with the head of the octopus. We’ve done a fantastic job dealing with all of the tentacles, we decimated Hamas, they almost don’t exist anymore, we are destroying Hezbollah. Iran is afraid of us. We’ve shown them what we can do; they have no air defenses right now,” he said.
“The people of Iran have no argument with Israel, they have no argument with Jews, 80% of them despise their own regime. I believe that with regime change in Iran, we could have peace in the Middle East for 100 years,” Adams said.