Amnesty criticizes Roger Waters for acting like @Amnesty - by Elder of Ziyon

...And now Amnesty is claiming that Roger Waters is only a fool with respect to Syria but still a stand-up guy with respect to supporting Palestinian terror?

Elder of Ziyon..
16 April '18..

Amnesty's Kristyan Benedict has lashed out at Roger Waters.

Not for his absurd pro-Hamas positions, but for his pro-Assad one:

The article that he refers to says:

The founder and frontman of British band Pink Floyd has echoed Russian propaganda claims that Syria's White Helmets had staged a recent chemical attack that has prompted US-led strikes against Damascus.

Roger Waters made the accusation during a concert in Barcelona on Friday after announcing that a supporter of the volunteer first responders had wanted speak to the crowd about the deadly chemical attack.

"The White Helmets are a fake organisation that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists," Waters said.

When it was pointed out to Benedict that Amnesty and Waters have worked together in the past, on the basis of Waters' purported human rights work as he obsesses about Israel and "Israeli" influence on world media and politics, Benedict acts surprised.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

In reality, Roger Waters isn't like Rosa Parks. He's like the KKK. - by Elder of Ziyon

...their motivation has nothing at all to do with civil rights. Like the KKK, they are motivated by hate for the world's only Jewish state, not by their love of Palestinians or concern for universal human rights. They don't give a damn about Palestinians - only about punishing Jewish Israelis. (They don't want to boycott Arab Israeli businesses.) Meaning that their fundamental driving factor really is antisemitism. And Roger Waters' hate is a perfect topic to be pushed in the New York Times.

Elder of Ziyon..
08 September '17..

The New York Times decided to give yet more oxygen to BDSers like Roger Waters.

Waters wrote an op-ed that is so absurd and filled with lies and half-truths that it brings up, yet again, the late Senator Patrick Moynihan's dictum, " Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Waters claims that the Israel Anti-Boycott Act violates free speech:

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Wall up against Waters’ stance on Israel

...Waters was the John Lennon of Pink Floyd; an aggressive, irascible hard-left political agitator who split the group up and now carries on like a pork chop fancying himself as some kind of modern-day rock revolutionary. But where Lennon believed in peace and love, Waters preaches bile and hatred.

Rowan Dean..
The Courier-Mail..
06 July '15..

I’VE decided to boycott Pink Floyd.

I will sanction The Dark Side of the Moon and divest myself of The Wall . It’s all part of my Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) Roger Waters campaign.

Which is heartbreaking, because I love Pink Floyd.

And I’ll really miss them.

But all my Floyd CDs have to go.

My campaign is in protest against the fact that Waters is chief spokesman of the hideously anti-Semitic Boycott Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

This is the same sinister campaign beloved of the Greens who make it their business to intimidate Jewish businesses (such as Max Brenner chocolate shops) and even a Jewish theatre, on the pretence of supporting the Palestinian “struggle”.

The same mob who savaged Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson for doing ads for SodaStream, an Israeli company which used to have a factory in the West Bank but was forced to close it, at the cost of thousands of Palestinian jobs.

Waters was the John Lennon of Pink Floyd; an aggressive, irascible hard-left political agitator who split the group up and now carries on like a pork chop fancying himself as some kind of modern-day rock revolutionary. But where Lennon believed in peace and love, Waters preaches bile and hatred.

All of it aimed at Israel.

BDS and the cultural terrorism of Roger Waters

...Both el-Hussein, BDS and Waters are a real threat to freedom of thought and the free world. They cultivate hatred; they cultivate silencing people; they give legitimacy to violence. Brainwashing, lies and incitement against Jews have already won once. In the world of Waters, BDS, Hamas and el-Hussein, it could happen again.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
20 Fberuary '15..

Never has the divide between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism been so slender. Two more attacks, in Copenhagen and then London, have eradicated what was left of the distance between these two racist phenomena. On the one hand, there was another inciteful attack from the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) brigade, led by Roger Waters, who managed to sign up hundreds of artists in the UK to a boycott of Israel. And on the other hand, there was another double attack by anti-Western and anti-Semitic terrorism, executed by Omar Abdel-Hamid el-Hussein in Denmark.

BDS is about the silencing of Israelis through boycott. El-Hussein targeted a conference on freedom of speech to silence people through gunfire.

The BDS movement, of which Waters has become one of the world's leading spokesmen, is not seeking a fair settlement of a two-state solution; it is not seeking peace, nor does it seek to end the occupation. It seeks the destruction of Israel, its elimination. Just like that.

The two leaders of the movement, Omar Barghouti and Ali Abunimah, clarify this in the clearest and most vocal way possible. Waters himself, one should note, goes a step further. He is not only anti-Israel, he also spouts anti-Semitic propaganda. In summer 2014, for example, he talked about a Jewish control of Hollywood, which he said was managing to keep people too frightened to join the BDS movement.

To complete the picture, Waters also equates what the Nazis did to the Jews with what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. If the BDS claims are correct, if Israel really has committed the unique historical crime of ethnic cleansing, if Israel is indeed committing genocide, if Israel is based on systematic apartheid, if Israel is indeed a Nazi state, and if the Jews really do control the world, one can understand and even justify terrorism against Israel and the Jews.

The thing is that el-Hussein and the supporters of BDS are products of the same inciteful propaganda and lies. It did not start this week. One inciteful propagandist, Ran HaCohen, described Israel as a state that fulfilled Hitler's vision. Another propagandist, Yitzhak Laor, claimed in a prestigious British journal that Israel does not need gas chambers because it destroys the Palestinians by increasing infant mortality. These are not criticisms, they are blood libels. This is the way of the BDS movement, spreading lies incessantly, from expressions of horror over what happened in 1948 to what is happening these days in Israel.

For the benefit of those who do not know the truth, here are the facts: In 1948, it was the Arabs who declared a war of extermination against the Jews. It was the Jews in Arab countries who suffered from pogroms. It was these Jews who were dispossessed of their property, who were expelled and became refugees. It was the Europeans in those years, with Churchill at their head, who declared repeatedly that the way to resolve conflicts was through the expulsion of populations to create nation-states. The nation state of the Jewish people also arose because the international community had adopted the principle of self-determination. The Arab world persisted in its refusal to recognize Israel. In the 1960s, the rhetoric of all the leaders of the Arab world was stepped up into the near annihilation of Israel.

Meet Roger Waters. Occupation: Professional liar

...It is not clear whether Waters is an anti-Semite. However, like your garden-variety skinhead, he too talks about Jewish or Israeli control over Fox and CNN. What is clear is that he is a fraud and a liar.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Times of Israel..
15 December '13..

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement is the most prominent anti-Israel movement in the West. It is neither a peace movement nor an anti-occupation movement. It is a movement that supports the destruction of the State of Israel in order to establish a single state in its stead. The BDS movement’s leaders declare this openly and publicly. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame has in recent years become one of BDS’s most important and celebrated spokespeople. Waters gives frequent interviews to explain his position. It is important to pay attention to what he says in order to expose how this industry of lies works.

In an interview he gave a few days ago, Waters explained his hostile position towards Israel, stating that certain right-wing rabbis in Israel “believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth to serve them and they believe that the indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 and have continued to kick off the land ever since are subhuman. The parallels with what went on in the 30s in Germany are so crushingly obvious that it doesn’t surprise me that the movement that both you and I are involved in is growing every day.”

This is a fascinating claim that bears exploring. First of all, Waters is right. There are some rabbis on Israel’s extreme right who hold racist and fascist views. In the 2013 elections, the extreme rightist party, of whose two members only one is considered to hold extremist views, did not gain enough votes to enter the Knesset. In other words, that view is not even represented in Israel’s parliament. The voters booted it out. And even the views of that MK are a far cry from those of a few extremist rabbis. So how exactly did Waters manage to make the leap from a handful of radical rabbis to a comparison to Nazi Germany?

Let’s continue. The most important Muslim denomination, the Sunna, has a major theologian who appears weekly on Al-Jazeera. His name is Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi, like Waters, is one of the most important advocates of the BDS movement – perhaps even more important than Waters. And that same Qaradawi has made it clear that he admires Hitler, expressing the hope that “next time the Muslims will finish the job.” Interestingly enough, Waters knows about a handful of racist rabbis but has completely missed the most important and best-known authority in Sunni Islam, although they bear such a strong resemblance to one another: They both harbor similar views on Israel and are members of the same global movement.

Does that make Waters an anti-Semite? The Pink Floyd Star maintains that, “The Jewish lobby is extraordinarily powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock’n roll as they say. I promise you, naming no names, I’ve spoken to people who are terrified that if they stand shoulder to shoulder with me they are going to get fucked. They have said to me ‘Aren’t you worried for your life’ and I go ‘No, I’m not.’”

Two Embarrassments - Roger Waters and BDS Movement

...We’ve arrived at this happy situation for several reasons, among them the growing realization, as articulated by John Lydon, that there is something absurd about boycotting Israel when the states that surround it engage in egregious human rights violations. Waters won’t play in Israel, but he was quite happy to play in Dubai in 2007—an Arab city almost entirely built by slave labor imported from Muslim countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. If other stars grasp the appalling hypocrisy this represents, then having Roger Waters indulge his hatred of Israel at every opportunity is a price worth paying.

Ben Cohen..
Algemeiner..
29 August '13..

JNS.org – Back in 1976, when the burgeoning punk movement began transforming the rock’n’roll landscapes of London and New York, a young man named John Lydon scrawled the words “I Hate…” on his Pink Floyd t-shirt. With this one stroke, Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of The Sex Pistols, demarcated the past from the future: eschewing the lengthy and ponderous compositions of Floyd’s frontman, Roger Waters, Rotten and his mates set about delivering sharp, angry tunes in a compact three-minute format.

Almost 40 years later, popular music has undergone numerous other transformations, but Rotten (who now calls himself Lydon again) and Waters have remained polar opposites. And as Israelis know better than most, that’s true both inside and outside the recording studio.

Back in 2010, Lydon rounded on critics of his decision to play a gig in Tel Aviv by telling them, “I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they (the Palestinians) are treated.”

By contrast, Waters—outwardly, a much more refined and eloquent fellow—has firmly hitched himself to the movement pressing for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Waters’s support for BDS is thought to be the reason that his scheduled appearance at the 92nd Sreet Y in New York City was canceled back in April, while more recently, he tussled with the Simon Wiesenthal Center over an accusation of anti-Semitism that stemmed from a feature of his live show, in which a Star of David is projected onto a flying inflatable pig.

In his response to the Wiesenthal Center, Waters stridently denied that he was an anti-Semite, coming out with the standard response that hating Zionism and hating Jews are completely distinct. But a subsequent letter written in August to “My Colleagues in Rock’n’Roll” —as you can see, his legendary pomposity remains unaltered—is certain to revive the charge. This time, it’s hard to see how Waters can wriggle around it.

Roger Waters, Another Brick in the Wall of Anti-Semitism

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
25 July '13..

Three years ago I wrote about the way rock icon Roger Waters had incorporated his anti-Israel beliefs into his act by using a Jewish symbol—the Star of David—interchangeably with those of oil companies and dollar signs in the course of a video display about oppression. At the time, I thought the Anti-Defamation League’s evaluation of the content of Waters’s act was correct. His rants seeking to delegitimize Israel’s security fence and the “Israel lobby” were discriminatory in nature and manifested a clear prejudice against the Jewish state and Jews. But I wondered whether the ADL had actually done Waters and his Israel-hating fans a service by calling him out about his beliefs since I doubted that anyone who didn’t already know his position could have really made much sense of the display, let alone connect Israel with his criticisms in what appeared to me a confusing video show. But judging by Waters’s behavior since then, perhaps the ADL was smarter about this than I thought.

Since then, Waters has become an even more outspoken supporter of the BDS movement, which seeks to impose a boycott of the State of Israel and which, because it singles out the Jewish state for treatment not accorded to other groups, is inherently prejudicial. He has also made the use of Jewish symbols in his act even more explicitly insulting. As Fox News reports, rather than simply rely on a video that, as I noted, was difficult to interpret correctly as an attack on Israel, he’s taken to using more old-school methods along with an even more primitive message:

Some concert goers were left feeling uncomfortably numb at a Roger Waters performance in Belgium last week when a black balloon in the shape of a wild pig – bearing a Jewish Star of David as well as symbols of dictatorial regimes from around the world – floated above the audience.

“I came to the concert because I really like his music, without any connection to his political stance toward Israel,” Alon Onfus Asif, an Israeli living in Belgium, told Ynet

. “And I had a lot of fun, until I noticed the Star of David, on the inflatable pig. That was the only religious-national symbol which appeared among other symbols for fascism, dictatorships and oppression of people. Waters crossed the line and gave expression to an anti-Semitic message, beyond all his messages of anti-militancy.”

The video, which can be seen here at the Elder of Ziyon website, shows that you don’t have to be looking for proof of anti-Semitism to find it at Waters’s show.

(Video) Antisemitism & The Latest Performance of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters

LOTL..
24 December '12..

Roger Waters, a member of the band Pink Floyd, has had a busy couple of weeks in New York City. On December 12th he was invited to sing at Madison Square Garden at a hurricane relief concert. However, on November 29th he was to give a performance of an entirely different type.


eyeontheun

Roger Waters, front-man for a rock band, and a hero to genocidal terrorists.

Visit www.EYEontheUN.org

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.
.

On the BDS Movement An Israeli Musician Hits the Right Note

Daphne Anson
28 March '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/israeli-musician-hits-right-note-on-bds.html

In the Jewish Daily Forward Kobi Oz, lead singer of the Israeli group Teapacks, has written an open letter to Roger Waters, front man of the group Pink Floyd, who recently announced his support for a cultural boycott of Israel and encouraged other musicians to follow suit.

The case against the BDS movement is superbly outlined by Kobi Oz (pictured below), who says in part:

'Unfortunately, the Middle East isn’t the most stable place, so Israelis know we have to be very careful as we pursue peace. We could sign an agreement with a moderate regime and suddenly find ourselves confronted with a fundamentalist enemy. We withdrew from Gaza and got Hamas. We pulled out of southern Lebanon, and now Hezbollah dominates the Lebanese government. We gave back the Sinai, and now Egypt is a great unknown.


Still, we yearn for peace. We try to talk with our neighbors in the Palestinian Authority, where life is getting better for ordinary Palestinians. If Hamas’s leaders would stop the bombardment of Israeli civilians and stop calling for our destruction and start having a normal relationship with their brothers in Ramallah, I’m sure that most Israelis would want to talk to them, too. And our wall, which you want to see dismantled, will fall when we have lasting quiet. Insha’Allah.


But in the meantime there are events like the murders in Itamar. Terrorists sneaked into a family’s home while they were sleeping and cut their throats. That settlement was outside of our security fence — they did not have this “appalling edifice,” as you called it, to protect them. A father, a mother and three kids — one a 3-month-old infant — paid the price.

Should we give up the fence that has made the last few years mostly free of suicide bombers? If we did, would you stand by our soldiers when they go out to intercept terrorists, or would you continue tying our hands while we fight to protect our citizens’ lives? I didn’t hear your voice, or the voices of your friends in the BDS movement, when thousands of Qassam rockets were being launched at my hometown and neighboring communities after we got out of Gaza. We only heard the world’s voice when we fought back.


Lastly, I want to ask, when you demand that we “promote” the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, do you understand that this means Israel would no longer be a Jewish state? If so, why should the Jews not be allowed to have their one state, while the Palestinians get four states? (Let me count them for you: the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the Hamas state in Gaza, Jordan with its Palestinian majority ruled over by a Hashemite king and an Israel that would have a majority of Palestinian citizens after millions of refugees’ descendants move here.) 

Jews have come home to Israel after centuries of living under Christian and Muslim “hospitality.” My own parents immigrated to Israel from Tunisia; they had to give up all their property and start their lives over. Jews from around the world came to Israel to fulfill our ancient dream of returning to our homeland, and to bring an end to our long nightmare of having no country to call our own.


Now you, in effect, are demanding that we forget all our dreams and become a minority in our own homeland. Are you serious? Have you not seen how the Coptic minority is treated in Egypt? Have you not seen how the Kurds have suffered in Turkey and Iraq? We won’t share their fate — we have had enough of that already. 

At your age you ought to be suspicious of open-and-shut narratives of the sort embraced by the BDS movement, and be willing to look more deeply at the other side. Of course, we Israelis have plenty of room for improvement and could do more to pursue peace. But you should understand that if we are cautious, it is because our very survival is at stake.


If you truly want to be helpful in bringing about peace, embrace the power of dialogue, not boycotts. Music is for breaking down walls, not for building new ones.'

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/136188/#ixzz1Hu7yBvlt

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Another Tack: Roger Waters’ jarring music

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
17 March '11

http://www.sarahhonig.com/?p=804

Was Binyamin Netanyahu a Pink Floyd freak in his salad days? Possibly not, but that’s no reason not to lend an ear to the band’s erstwhile lead singer Roger Waters.

It’s not that the aging rocker’s opinions should remotely constitute any yardstick for what’s decent and honorable. If anything, they most definitely shouldn’t. Waters has consistently, almost robotically, espoused every wrongheaded doctrinaire leftist cause since his star first twinkled in the frenzied firmament of psychedelic and “progressive” music.

No modicum of evenhandedness should be expected from this self-important and predictable propagandist for radical politics which a priori demonize Israel. But it may be useful for us, by way of a reality check, to hear what he says to justify his antagonism toward us.

Expounding to Al Jazeera the other day on why he supports the anti-Israel boycott, Waters claimed that Israelis only “pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians, and they sort of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution.”

In other words, Israeli peace overtures, proposals and plans are insincere.

It matters diddley that Waters doesn’t even begin to grasp the rudiments of the actual roots of this dispute (Arab genocidal attacks against the Jews from 1920 all the way to last week’s Itamar massacre) or the complexity of our situation (an Arab Palestinian state already exists on four-fifths of original Palestine, even if it was renamed Jordan).

It doesn’t even matter that he counts the Negev as one of the areas from which Israel allegedly evicts Palestinians to preempt the two-state solution. A quick glance at the map might indicate to Waters that the Negev is inside Israel proper, within what he purports to set aside as a rightful reservation for the Jews of the Mideast – assuming this isn’t only “lip service to the idea” on his part.

In any case, facts are inconsequential minor bothers in his ever-trendy postmodern outlook. Yet Waters’ assertion that a successive variety of extravagant (and eminently foolhardy) Israeli sacrifices are all two-faced and not to be believed isn’t his private idiosyncrasy.

Indeed, this is the prevalent perception not only among Waters’ obsessive ideological clones but across most of respectable polite society in Europe especially.

This has become the axiomatic premise.

Therefore, whatever we offer in our hysterical search for good-guy credentials is likely to be discredited and paradoxically deepen our isolation.

A mini-reprieve could only be attained by our outright capitulation, contrition and self-condemnation of our very struggle to survive. Our suicide might be acknowledged, temporarily at least, as laudable.

Since wholesale self-destruction isn’t what Netanyahu could consciously opt for, anything less wouldn’t only be a waste of time but would do actual harm. Consequently the notion of rushing off to Washington to wow Congress with yet another compromise (cooked up by Netanyahu’s flunky Defense Minister Ehud Barak) is a dud. It cannot but end in a diplomatic debacle, domestic demoralization and a defense flop to boot.

The suggestion that yet another speech calculated to mitigate our plight, via yet another supposedly new peace initiative, cannot even wait till May boggles the mind. It’d be a washout in May too. Declaiming it any earlier won’t make it any less of a fiasco – just as Netanyahu’s June 2009 Bar-Ilan speech generated nothing even marginally beneficial but wrought us lots of damage.

In his then-effort to alleviate excruciating external pressure – especially from the inimical Barack Obama – Netanyahu for the first time proclaimed newfound devotion to the two-state scheme. Exasperatingly, however, his popularity abroad wasn’t thereby enhanced. Quite the contrary. As yesteryear’s Pink Floyd soloist intones, Netanyahu – and with him Israel collectively – remains suspected, portrayed at best as an agent of delay, if not altogether an intransigent holdout. This only intensifies the enticement to crush Israel’s perceived noncompliance.

For 10 months Netanyahu froze all Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to deny Mahmoud Abbas pretexts for not talking. Yet while all eyes were accusingly fixated on scoundrel Israel, nobody paid attention to how Ramallah figurehead Abbas undermined the very two-state solution concocted to appease him.

Abbas handily managed to scuttle all mediation, while ingeniously succeeding to paint Israel as obstructionist.

Now his insistence on a categorical construction freeze is regarded around the globe as a nonnegotiable prerequisite.

There’s an inescapable dynamic here. Incremental concessions are inevitably rejected by the emboldened Arab side, and hence are judged as insufficient if not meaningless by the international community. The more piecemeal goodwill gestures Israel makes, the more these are devalued and taken for granted.

Each such concession becomes a self-evident right for the Palestinian side and a conceded loss for Israel.

Previous proposals – even if rebuffed at the time – form the new square one from which to demand more of Israel during the next push for renewed “negotiations.”

The upshot is that we aren’t mistrusted because we’re not forthcoming enough, but because we’re too forthcoming.

By default Netanyahu accepts Abbas’s rules of bargaining: no Palestinian budging but “painful concessions” from Israel. Netanyahu has repeatedly pledged his readiness for the latter.

His only caveat is that giving Abbas what he wants must be accompanied by security arrangements geared to keep as many Israelis as possible from being slaughtered by Palestinians (i.e. Itamar) who’ll take control of the hilltops overlooking Israel’s densest population center on the Coastal Plain, where we would all be sitting ducks.

While Netanyahu stresses security, Abbas postures as the determined resistance leader who demands due justice for the downtrodden. Abbas impresses shallow listeners as a liberator aiming to redress profound wrongs. In the topsy-turvy narrative espoused by a voluntarily gullible world, Israel is automatically at fault while its would-be annihilators are desperate insurgents against injustice.

By not challenging Abbas’s pose as the champion of overthrowing oppression, Netanyahu allows him to paint Israelis as oppressors.


Bibi should go back to basics, play hardball and holler from the rooftops that there is justice in the Zionist revival and an inborn tie to Eretz Yisrael, that we aren’t foreign interlopers and vile occupiers in our own homeland, that we were attacked both in 1948 and 1967, that we fought for our very lives and not for the glory of conquest.

Talking about Jewish rights is uncool, which perhaps is why most of us prefer pragmatic security-oriented parlance. Yet worthy and cogent though it may be, exclusive reliance on security concerns implies that we only seek means to further entrench ourselves in usurped property. Such insidious subtexts are underscored when we indicate inclination to cede territory.

This doesn’t really radiate apparent moderation; it weakens Israel’s case.

Whereas aggrieved “native” Abbas fights to regain the “legacy of his forebears,” we carp about the minutiae of border arrangements. We appear like mediocre bureaucrats clinging to as much of our ill-gotten gains as we can. This is Roger Waters’ jarring music. Why should we dance to his tune?

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

The lunatic in Roger’s head

The Alchemist
CiF Watch
17 March '11




Roger Waters, founding member of Pink Floyd, has joined the chorus of artists, activists and agitators calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

There is something to be said about the mind of the artist, sensitive, emotional, always searching for drama .

It is what fuels the creative process.

Waters, who hasn’t really written any new material since the late 80s, has embarked on a road which he first padded with the last Pink Floyd album he wrote, The Final Cut.

The album sealed the fate of his membership in the band as, by this time, he refused to accept the material his partner David Gilmour wrote for the project, opening the door for one of the nastiest break ups in the music industry. Law suits followed in which Waters attempted to prevent the rest of the group from using the name Pink Floyd. Fans were divided, and Waters was left on the sidelines writing two solo projects, both resembling old Pink Floyd records, while the rest of the group moved on with a series of big sellers and sold out tours.

(Read full "The lunatic in Roger’s head")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Roger Waters’ apartheid fantasies

Petra Marquardt-Bigma
The Warped Mirror/JPost
13 March '11

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/roger-waters%E2%80%99-apartheid-fantasies

In an Al Jazeera interview in early March, rock star Roger Waters announced not only that he was about to start a major tour of Europe, but also that he was joining the campaign of “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel” (BDS).

A few days later, Walters published a written statement explaining his decision, which was eventually also published by the Guardian’s Comment is Free web site under the blockbuster title “Tear down this Israeli wall.”

The sub-header announced: “I want the music industry to support Palestinians’ rights and oppose this inhumane barrier.”

One of the first reader comments noted: “Is that the ‘Palestinian’ right to murder Israeli women and children through homicide bombers you mean?”

Sadly, just a few hours after the Guardian posted the piece by Waters, the news broke that five members of an Israeli family – the parents and three of their children – had been stabbed to death by Palestinian terrorists.

And once again, there were soon reports of people in Gaza celebrating the barbaric murders.

How long will it be before the Palestinians will name a street, or a building, or some event after the perpetrators of this attack?

Reportedly, Palestinian Culture Minister Siham Barghouti once said that “honoring them in this way is the least we can give them, and this is our right.”

The Palestinians have already exercised this “right” very often, most recently a few days ago, when a Fatah-affiliated youth center near Ramallah named a sports event after female suicide bomber Wafa Idris.

It is irrelevant if Roger Waters knows about the official and institutionalized glorification of terrorists by Palestinians. His uncritical support for Palestinian “rights” inevitably provides an endorsement of everything the Palestinians claim as their “rights.” Indeed, Waters explicitly includes “rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel” as something he supports. The obvious conclusion is that he doesn’t believe that there should be a Jewish state.

However, what is even more obvious is that Waters couldn’t care less about Israel or the Palestinians. His support for the BDS campaign is really all about Roger Waters – an ageing rock star in search of a high-profile “cause.”

Waters begins his op-ed by recalling that his song “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” had been banned by the South African apartheid regime; and he then proceeds to tell his readers that this very same song was used by Palestinian children “to protest against Israel’s wall around the West Bank.” Waters also recounts his visit to “the wall” a few years ago, when he performed in Israel – not, as originally planned in Tel Aviv, but in Neve Shalom, because he worried that his “presence on a Tel Aviv stage would inadvertently legitimize the oppression” he had witnessed.

By now, Waters apparently feels that Israel’s “oppression” requires him to declare his support for the BDS campaign. One of the reasons he cites for his BDS support is that “the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews.”

It looks like even the BDSers realize that the “apartheid” libel is kind of hard to justify by accusing Israel of not granting equal rights to Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens – but there is a simple solution to this predicament: just claim that Israeli Arabs don’t have the same rights as “those enjoyed by Israeli Jews.”

To be sure, minorities everywhere have often plenty of reason to complain about discrimination, and in this respect, Israel is hardly doing much better than many other countries, including countries in Europe. But there are serious efforts to improve the situation in Israel, and some of them are rather successful.

As much as Roger Waters might long for the glorious days of having his songs used by black South Africans opposing apartheid, he is now boycotting a country where hardly anyone notices the fact that an Arab judge from Jaffa presided over the panel that recently convicted the former president of the Jewish state.

But in the BDS milieu, it’s the empty slogans that count. After all, one of its leading figures is Omar Barghouti: born in Qatar, raised in Egypt, educated at Columbia University in New York, he eventually moved to Ramallah and then decided to pursue his studies at a university he wants everyone else to boycott – Tel Aviv University.

Two years ago, Barghouti toured Canadian universities “as part of Israeli Apartheid Week” and announced to his presumably very pleased audiences that “Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived.”

One passage of the text illustrates some of the catchy BDS slogans very nicely:

“In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, non-violent resistance, but a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.”

If you think that “all humans” should include Jews, think again, because Barghouti makes it very clear that Jewish self determination is out of the question:

“The conceptual origins of Israel’s unique form of apartheid are found in Zionism, a racist European ideology that was adopted by the dominant stream of the Zionist movement (World Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund, among others) in order to justify and recruit political support for its colonial project of establishing an exclusive Jewish state in historic Palestine.”

So this is ultimately what the BDS movement stands for, and what Roger Waters has signed on to: the resurrection of the odious equation of Zionism with racism.

It was a fitting coincidence that the UN adopted this infamous resolution on the 37th anniversary of the Nazi “Kristallnacht” pogrom.

Gil Troy once noted that “BDS sounds like a new communicable disease – in many ways it is.”

But in many ways it is just a mutated version of a very old pathology.

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Roger Waters is A Fool; Rashad Bayoumi Isn't; Obama?

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
07 March '11

Roger Waters of the Pink Floyd band has announced his support of BDS, although not until a few years after doing a large concert in Israel which probably generated a spot of income, so the practical aspect of boycotting dosen't mean much. In this article he explains his decision.

I don't much follow such matters, but I expect Waters is a talented musician. His grasp on the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict is very shaky; here's a man who can be fed contradictory lies and swallows them all unthinkingly. I was especially impressed by the fact that he returns again and again to the wall Israel has built (well, that would make sense, given Water's history of walls), without ever reflecting on the fact that the wall is actually an expression of ending the occupation: the sense of having a border is that the Palestinians will end up on one side, and the Israelis on the other, and there will be a border separating them. The wall, and partition, also contradict the right of return he supports, but no matter. The important thing is that a man with no grasp of the reality feels it's an honorable thing to make idiotic and counter-factual statements about the Jewish state, and he'll be applauded for doing so by large numbers of other malicious fools. That's the important heart of the matter.

Rashad Bayoumi isn't a fool. He's a hard-core antisemite, of the boilerplate opinion that Jews rule America and America wishes to destroy Islam, and Israel is the tool they use to attack the Muslim world from its geographic center. He's also a top fellow in the Muslim brotherhood. Just like everyone else, I don't know how influential he and his evil comrades will be in the new Arab world that will rise from the present turmoil, but it certainly needs careful monitoring at the least, and lots of careful planing: what if he turns out to be very influential? What then? Here, for starters, is a translated interview with him from last week. Listen, and shudder.

(Read full "Roger Waters is A Fool; Rashad Bayoumi Isn't; Obama?")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Anti-Israel smears get new boost all across Europe....

.... as Pink Floyd star sprays preposterous remarks on security barrier
Robin Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
20 August 09

So what happens when you put together an ageing British rock star, a Finnish director, and a spokesman for the United Nations to launch a short film about Israel’s security barrier, sorry, “Apartheid Wall”? Let’s begin with the money quote. As Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters had it this week (using the catch line from one of his most famous songs) in a story quoted all across Europe by French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP):

‘”It fills me with horror, the thought of living in a giant prison,” Waters says as he spray-paints “We don’t need no thought control” on the wall.’

Oh dear, oh dear. One of the problems with political fanaticism, of course, is that the people who participate in it quickly lose all sense of what they are saying and doing. But this — ‘We don’t need no thought control’? — is preposterous even by anti-Israeli standards. Time then for a bit of loopy logic from the United Nations just to guarantee this particular piece’s entry into the idiotic-story-of-the-year competition.

For full effect, I have left the narrative and the quotations from the AFP story intact:

‘Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said he hoped the virtual disappearance of [suicide bombing] attacks in recent years would encourage Israel to rethink the barrier.

“The number of suicide bombings has dropped from about 38 a year to one in the last two years,” he said ahead of the premiere. “This might be an opportunity to reflect if the reasons still prevail for continued construction at the expense of tens of thousands of Palestinians.”‘

Hmmm. So let’s get this right. The security barrier has been highly successful in preventing suicide bombings. Since its success is now proven, this obviously means that it should be removed.

Make of that what you will.

The film, entitled ‘Walled Horizons’ and narrated by Waters, takes its cue from the fifth anniversary of the notorious ruling by the International Court of Justice in 2004 which said, in a purely advisory capacity, that the route of the security barrier was illegal and that it should be torn down.

Yohan Eriksson, the Finnish director of the film, was quoted by AFP as saying of his production:

“It is first and foremost a reminder that the world’s highest court has essentially said you cannot build a fence on your neighbour’s yard.”

Actually, in a world of sanity and decency it would “first and foremost” be a reminder of the brutal realities of Palestinian political culture which necessitated the barrier’s construction in the first place.

But as AFP reminds us: ‘The Palestinians view it as an “Apartheid Wall”‘. With which casual and seemingly innocent reference the notion of Israel as the modern day equivalent of Apartheid South Africa is once again pumped into Europe’s collective mind. And so it goes.
.