I’ve read some heavy-duty attacks on Israel and Jews in my time, but they pale beside the anti-Semitic diatribe
recently offered by Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s co-founder and former
front man. In an interview with CounterPunch online magazine, Waters
experienced a Jew-hating colonic where he purged himself of all the
racist refuse that had accumulated in his putrid system and clearly
required release.
According
to Waters, Israel is a “racist apartheid regime,” which practices
“ethnic cleansing.” A great artist such as himself will not play in a
country equivalent to the “Vichy government in occupied France.” But
accusing Jews of being Nazi collaborators was not enough. Waters then
went further, comparing Israel to the Nazis themselves. “I would not
have played in Berlin either… during the Second World War.” Waters
believes that Israel is guilty of genocide, only “this time it’s the
Palestinian People being murdered.”
Waters was on a roll, with no intention of
stopping. Israel is “a brutal and oppressive regime.” And the Rabbis,
oh, those murderous, racist rabbis. “The right wing rabbinate is so
bizarre. They believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth
to serve them and the indigenous people of the region that they kicked
off the land in 1948… since they are sub-human. The parallels with what
went on in the 30’s in Germany are so crushingly obvious.”
The Jews are dumping a “huge bucket of crap
that they are pouring into the mouth of a gullible public, in my view,
when they say ‘we are afraid of Iran, it is going to get nuclear
weapons’… It’s a diversionary tactic.”
I could go on quoting Waters’ interview but
I’m getting nauseous just writing this stuff. Suffice it to say that he
claims he was offered “$10 million” by a Jewish promoter to play in
Israel but retorted, “Are you f—ing deaf or just dumb?! I am part of the
BDS movement, I’m not going anywhere in Israel, for any money.” He then
tried to dissuade Cyndi Lauper from playing in Israel.
I would assume that given his interview not
too many Israelis will lament losing the chance to see a Pink Floyd
reunion in Israel, and maybe we should just leave it at that. But even
loathsome, stomach-turning anti-Semitism deserves a response in case
gullible fans might actually believe this twisted, incendiary twaddle.
The Nazis, Mr. Waters, were a genocidal regime
who murdered six million Jews. That you would have the audacity to
compare Jews to monsters who murdered them shows you have no decency,
you have no heart, you have no soul. The Jews of Germany did nothing to
invite the aggression against them. Indeed, they were loyal citizens of a
country that many of them had fought for courageously just twenty years
earlier in the First World War. They did not blow up buses for
political purposes. They did not send terrorists into schools to murder
children. They did not preach that killing German children would get
them virgins in heaven. They lived lives of humanity and decency and
were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.
You have disgraced yourself by comparing the
martyred six million, which included one-and-a-half million children who
were gassed to death in cold blood, to Palestinian terror organizations
like Hamas, and to Hezbollah, both of whose stated intention it is to
wipe Israel off the map.
The Palestinians were given endless
opportunities to live with Israel in peace, including the 1936-1937 Peel
Commission, which partitioned the land into two states, and the UN
partition plan of 1947, both of which gave the Arabs far more land than
the Jews. The Jews accepted the offer and the Arabs rejected it and
dedicated themselves to Israel’s destruction. If you don’t believe me,
Mr. Waters, then surely even a bigoted ignoramus like you is capable of
accessing Wikipedia or opening a Britannica.
After the Arabs launched another war of
annihilation against Israel in 1967, the Jews miraculously defeated four
invading Arab armies and conquered huge tracts of land. Rather than
practicing any kind of ethnic cleansing, Israel gave back the entire
Sinai Peninsula — an area three times the size of Israel — to Egypt in
exchange for a peace treaty, and announced that they would leave the
Arabs and the Muslim Waqf in charge of the holiest site in all of
Judaism, the Temple Mount. This act of accommodation has no precedent in
the history of the world.
Still, in 1964 Arafat launched the PLO, with
its declared intention of liberating the land through armed struggle and
destroying the Zionist presence. Terrible terrorist outrages like the
1970 Avivim school bus massacre and the 1974 Ma’alot school massacre
followed. Still, Israel never relinquished its hope that Arab leaders
who were sincere about peace might arise.
In 2005 Israel voluntarily withdrew from all
of Gaza. Their reward? Hamas, with its genocidal charter against Israel,
was voted into power and almost immediately began launching thousands
of rockets into Israel, targeting homes, schools, and buses filled with
children.
I have long preached how we Jews owe an
eternal debt of gratitude to Islam for welcoming us in after repeated
Christian expulsions, especially from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in
1498. Islam, as a great world religion that has often protected Jews, is
stained by those who murder in its name and by hate-filled buffoons
like Waters who defend atrocities perpetrated by those who claim to lead
lives of faith. Likewise, the moral equivalency between Hamas firing
rockets to intentionally murder a pregnant woman,
as it did last year, November 15, 2012, with 26-year-old Mira Sharf,
and Israel’s responding by taking out Hamas military commanders like
Ahmed al-Jabari, the mastermind of so many acts of terror, is itself
repugnant. The Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not murder,” rather
than “Thou shalt not kill.” Murder is the taking of innocent life in
cold blood. Killing is protecting the innocent from murderers as an act
of self-defense. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between Hamas
and Israel.
Muslims have every right to expect that Jews
in general, and rabbis in particular, similarly condemn any acts of
violence intentionally directed at any Arab civilian. We are all equally
children of one God.
Hamas’ values are just as much a disgrace to
the peace-loving principles of Islam. Hamas is motivated not by
Palestinian freedom but by hatred of Jews. Hamas’ charter continues to
call for genocide against Israel and the Jewish people: “The Day of
Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will
hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, O Muslims…
there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
When Hamas came to power in 2006, they
channeled the billions they received as the world’s largest per capita
recipients of international foreign aid into rockets rather than
hospitals, bombs rather than universities. And they intentionally launch
their rockets from nurseries and schools turning the innocent
Palestinian population into human shields, not surprising for an
organization which regularly murders Palestinian homosexuals under the
false accusation of collaboration and engages in honor killings of young
Palestinian women whose only crime is to have a boyfriend.
I recognize and mourn the loss, in extreme
circumstances, of innocent Palestinian life amid Israel’s attempts to
destroy the Hamas terrorism infrastructure. Even the most advanced
military instruments that Israel employs in order to reduce as much as
humanly possible any and all civilian collateral casualties are still
ultimately imprecise. Every Arab life is the equal of every Jewish life,
and Israel goes to lengths unmatched in modern warfare to avoid
innocent deaths. But what choice does Israel have when Hamas has coiled
itself around Gaza like a poisonous viper, bringing suffering to
Palestinian and Israeli alike.
Waters’ balderdash about rabbis believing that
non-Jews are subhumans is the dirtiest of blood libels and contradicts
the core teachings of the Torah which states in its very first chapter,
Genesis 1, that every human being is created equally in the image of
God.
And surely, even someone with as rancid a
heart as Waters is familiar with what Christians call Jesus’ Golden
rule, but which is actually found in the Hebrew Bible, the commandment
to
“Love your fellow man as yourself” (Leviticus 19.17), which Hillel,
in the Talmud, interpreted to mean, “That which you hate do not do unto
others.”
Perhaps Waters should take Hillel’s advice to
his desiccated soul and stop maligning a people who have paid a terrible
price for the kind of abominable lies that people like Waters unjustly
hurl.
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