Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman also known for his vocal criticism of Israel that crosses the line into anti-Semitism, claims in an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan that the Jewish state is attempting to manufacture a new intifada with the ultimate goal of killing as many Palestinians as possible.
“The Israelis seem now to have a policy of murdering so many of them, that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada, so they can make it an armed conflict where they’re a thousand times, 10,000 times more powerful than the Palestinian people…so they can just kill them all,” Waters, an outspoken supporter of the BDS Movement, said on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Waters also called the Gaza Strip-ruling terrorist organization Hamas the “democratically elected government of Gaza,” acknowledging the existence of an “armed wing” of Hamas yet justifying the Palestinians’ “absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation” and then minimizing the impact of their rocket attacks against Israel. The rockets “almost never do any damage because they’re very ineffectual,” he said.
Rogan, meanwhile, lamented that Palestinians “through no fault of their own, just happened to be born Palestinian and [have] been stuck in this apartheid state,” referring to Israel.
In July, when describing the events that led to the establishment of the modern State of Israel, Waters said, “It’s about a bunch of, you know, Europeans back in the middle of the 19th century deciding that they were going to take over this piece of land, and kick out anybody that lived there and take it over for themselves and for their own little cabal.”
Ahead of Waters’ tour of Florida in August, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) penned an op-ed that called out the musician’s years of “unjustified hatred” for Israel and anti-Semitism.
“When you tell interviewers that an ‘Israel lobby’ is responsible for [former Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral loss in Britain, that there is a Zionist conspiracy to block criticism of Israel in America’s news and music industry, and that believing the Jews are God’s chosen people is the same as saying Arab lives ‘are worthless,’ you can’t be surprised that people take you for an anti-Semite,” Rubio wrote for The Floridian.