Pink Floyd lyricist calls Roger Waters an antisemite and ‘Putin apologist’

Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and a lyricist on the band’s two most recent albums, has spoken out against former bandleader Roger Waters on Twitter, describing him as an antisemite and a “Putin apologist”.

“Sadly [Waters] you are antisemitic to your rotten core,” she wrote. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”

In response to Samson’s tweet, Waters posted a statement on his own Twitter, reading: “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson, which he refutes entirely. He is currently taking advice as to his position.”

Samson’s tweet is seemingly in reference to an interview Waters did with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper earlier this month, reposted in translation on Waters’ website, in which he wonders if “Putin [is] a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II”, and says that Putin “governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”

In the interview, Waters also said that “Israel Lobby activists” were trying to have his concerts in Germany cancelled, and that “the Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period … We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine.” He also expresses his continued support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and that he would still play in Moscow, “given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.”

Waters has long been accused of antisemitism due to his repeated comparisons between the Israeli state and Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Observer in 2013, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach wrote that Waters had “no decency, you have no heart, you have no soul” for comparing “Jews to monsters who murdered them”. Waters, in response, acknowledged that “the Holocaust was brutal and disgusting beyond our imagination,” but that he “deplore[s] the policies of the Israeli government in the occupied territories and Gaza,” and that he was “not an antisemite”.

In 2017, German public broadcasters cancelled the broadcast of Waters’ concerts in Berlin and Cologne due to “accusations of antisemitism against him”.

Last year, two scheduled Waters concerts in Poland were cancelled due to an open letter he sent Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska in which he said that “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine were to blame for “this disastrous war”.