A Bit More About Roger Waters Likening Shireen Abu Akleh to Anne Frank

At his latest performance, in Berlin, Roger Waters displayed on the screen above his head a list of people whom he apparently believes deserve equally our sympathy and admiration. Not everyone will agree. Robert Spencer wrote about this here, and more on this can be found here: “Roger Waters dresses up as SS officer, compares Anne Frank to Abu Akleh,” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2023:

…The screen [at the Berlin concert] proceeded to display the names of Sophie Scholl, an anti-Nazi activist murdered by the Nazis; Mahsa Amini, who was murdered by Iranian “morality police”; George Floyd, who was shot [sic for “suffocated”] by a police officer in Minneapolis; and Anne Frank, who was murdered by the Nazis in Bergen-Belsen, among other individuals killed by various authorities and regimes throughout the past century.

Roger Waters is placing on the same moral plane very different people and their different fates; making distinctions is not his strong suit. The only thing that links these people is that they were all killed. But only some of them were deliberately murdered. Sophie Scholl was part of an anti-Nazi resistance group based in Munich, the White Rose, along with her brother Hans; they were both murdered by the Nazis. Mahsa Amini was a victim of the Iranian regime, but she was not a resister against oppression, putting her life on the line as had Sophie Scholl; she simply happened to have her hijab improperly affixed, so that some of her hair showed; the Morality Police in Iran took her away, and no doubt inflicted the beating that ended up killing her. George Floyd was a petty criminal who has been turned into a martyr-hero only because of the circumstances of his death. Anne Frank was the young Jewish girl who for several years managed to hide with her family in a secret attic space in an Amsterdam apartment, until she and her whole family were finally denounced to the Nazis; she died at the age of 15, of typhus, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was not simply a victim, but also a witness, and an artist of the written word, who left a diary describing her days hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, that has become the most widely read book written by a victim of the Holocaust.

The list also included Abu Akleh, who is believed to have been killed by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier during a shootout with Palestinian terrorists in Jenin, and Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by an armored IDF bulldozer in the southern Gaza Strip in 2003. In both cases, Palestinians claim that Abu Akleh and Corrie were targeted directly by the IDF, while the IDF says the deaths were an accident.

Abu Akleh’s name was listed in big letters, right beside that of Anne Frank, sparking outrage from Israeli and Jewish activists and officials around the world.

Roger Waters wants to liken the story of Shireen Abu-Akleh’s death to the death of Anne Frank, and thereby to suggest that just as the Nazis murdered Anne Frank, so the Israelis murdered Abu Akleh and Rachel Corrie. But the Israelis did not intentionally murder either woman. There is no Israeli Gestapo, no Israeli concentration or labor or death camps. No Israeli called for their execution. No Israeli wanted either woman to die. Rachel Corrie died by accident. She was run over in Rafah, Gaza by an armored bulldozer that she attempted to block by standing right in front of it. But from where he sat, the bulldozer’s driver could not see Corrie – his view was blocked by the enormous plow, and he ran her over.

As for Shireen Abu Akleh, her killing took place in the middle of a firefight just on the outskirts of Jenin. Israel conducted a meticulous investigation of the incident and concluded that while it is likely that an Israeli soldier shot Abu Akleh, her death was unintentional. Of course, it doesn’t take an investigation to realize that it would have made no sense for the Israelis to deliberately kill a journalist. The US government’s own investigation came to the same conclusion: her death was “likely” caused by an Israeli soldier, but there had not been any deliberate intent to kill the Palestinian journalist. This is the essential difference that Roger Waters wants to erase: for him the Israelis are always murderers. They are the new Nazis.

The @Israel Twitter account run by the Foreign Ministry bashed Waters on Wednesday, tweeting “Good morning to every one but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”

After the list of names [on screen at Waters’ performance in Berlin], a graphic on the screen stated that “they” are so brutal “because they want to crush our resistance and keep ruling the world.”

Who are “they” who want to “crush our resistance” and to “keep ruling the world”? Why, those all-powerful Jews. Who else could it be, in the fetid antisemitic mind of Roger Waters? Those who know Waters best – have known him for decades — are his former bandmate David Gilmour and Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, who wrote lyrics for some Pink Floyd songs. The couple have no trouble describing Waters as an antisemite. It was Polly Sampson who last year tweeted “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.”

Keep that devastating indictment in mind, from those who know Waters best, the next time you hear someone claim that Roger Waters “is not an antisemite. A court in Frankfurt said so.” The court said nothing of the kind.

After an intermission, Waters walked on stage in a SS uniform as an inflatable pig with various words and symbols and glowing eyes floated over the crowd and banners in the style of the Third Reich but with crossed hammers instead of a swastika hanging from the ceiling. Waters proceeded to fire a fake machine gun toward the audience.

Think of Waters appearing post-intermission on stage, now changed into an SS uniform, likely wearing gleaming leather boots, the ominous banners displaying quasi-swastika emblems consisting of crossed swords, and the pièce de resistance, that fake machine gun firing fake bullets at a real audience. What could be more fun? And what better way to pay a tribute to the dead — Rachel Corrie and Sophie Scholl and Anne Frank and Shireen Abu Akleh — all more or less the same in Roger Waters’ terminally confused mind, than to stomp around on stage in an SS uniform, pretending to fire your fake machine gun at a real audience?

Later in the performance, Waters displayed the words “F$%& the occupation” while singing “Lay Down Jerusalem (If I Had Been God).”

When Waters displayed the words “F$%& the occupation,” what “occupation” did he have in mind? Surely he meant the “occupation” of “stolen Palestinian land” by what Waters insists is the “colonial-settler state of Israel.” He is spectacularly ignorant, is our Mr. Waters, about the history of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs who wish to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a 23rd Arab one. Waters has no knowledge of the Mandate for Palestine, which he certainly could not ever have read. Nor does he know what is in the Treaty of San Remo, or in Article 80 of the UN Charter. He cannot possibly grasp the significance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, as explicated by its author, the British ambassador to the UN, Lord Caradon. Of course, Roger Waters has in mind the only “occupation” that for a quarter-century he has been inveighing against, as a promoter and propagandist for the anti-Israel BDS movement.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the performance on Wednesday, tweeting “Shame on Frankfurt authorities and Mercedes Benz arena in Berlin — a place from where Jews were deported by the Nazis — for providing antisemite #RogerWaters this venue for his concert with no concern/care for the Jewish community.”

Waters also performed in Munich and is set to perform in Frankfurt, with Uwe Becker, anti-semitism commissioner for the German state of Hessen, calling on local officials to at least prevent “the worst antisemitic propaganda motifs” if they cannot prevent the show entirely, according to German media. Frankfurt had originally banned the concert entirely, but a local court ruled that the city must allow the performance.

Roger Waters has for years been obsessing over Israel, the state that he insists lies on stolen Palestinian land, though he apparently is unaware that the Zionists paid for every dunam of land they settled on during the Mandate period, sometimes paying their Arab and Turkish absentee owners many times the market value of that land. Nor does he realize that all “state and waste land” in Mandatory Palestine was to be made available for “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? Why, Mandatory Palestine was supposed to include all the land “from the river to the sea.”

Waters has said that “I’m not sure that there is any much harsher regimes around the world than this [Israel], actually, if you look at it.”

Take a look at that: according to Waters, Israel has a “harsher regime” than China, Russia, North Korea, Iran. Yes, we all know about Israel’s reeducation camps, its labor camps, its executions of homosexuals, its starvation of prisoners, its hanging judges, its torture chambers all much worse than what goes on anywhere else in the world.

And Roger Waters has accused Israel of committing genocide on the Palestinians, even though the population of those Palestinians has skyrocketed. In 1967, the population of Gaza and the West Bank was 1.3 million. Today it is 5.3 million. Or take just east Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed, and where one might assume the Israeli government would try to discourage Arabs from living. Far from it: in 1967 there were 66,000 Arabs in east Jerusalem; today there are 344,000.

Let the last word on Roger Waters be that tweeted by Polly Samson, his former bandmate Dave Gilmour’s wife, a few months ago. I quoted it above, but it bears repeating:

 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.

About Roger Waters, nothing else need be said.