British court rules against antisemitic Pink Floyd frontman in defamation case brought by pro-Israel journalist—and Al Jazeera could pay damages

The case could go to trial to determine damages, though barrister Simon Myerson predicted that Waters and Al Jazeera will settle with Ware.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

A British court determined in a preliminary ruling that Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters defamed John Ware, a veteran journalist who made a documentary critical of Waters’s anti-Semitic history when he called Ware a “lying, conniving Zionist mouthpiece” who supports the “genocide of the Palestinian people.”

The development puts both Waters and the Hamas-friendly network Al Jazeera on the hook for damages.

In the Tuesday ruling, the British High Court of Justice found that Waters’s “statements are defamatory” because they were offered as fact, not opinion.

The decision sets the stage for Ware to receive financial compensation not just from Waters but also from Al Jazeera, the Arab network funded in large part by the Hamas-friendly nation of Qatar.

Waters’s comments targeting Ware came during a 2024 interview on the Al Jazeera network, which Ware sued in addition to Waters.

The case could go to trial to determine damages, though barrister Simon Myerson predicted that Waters and Al Jazeera will settle with Ware.

Ware, a documentarian who produced a 2023 film examining Waters’s vast anti-Israel advocacy, sued the musician and Al Jazeera last year. Waters appeared on Al Jazeera to bash Ware’s film and accused the journalist of “cheerleading the genocide of the Palestinian people like almost more than anyone else on earth.”

Ware’s documentary, The Dark Side of Roger Waters, was produced for the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British nonprofit that combats Jew hatred.

In it, Ware examined the singer’s long history of anti-Israel activism and embrace of anti-Semitic imagery. Waters, for instance, dressed in Nazi regalia during a 2023 show and displayed an inflatable pig emblazoned with Jewish stars.

Ware’s documentary detailed the musician’s plans to add other slogans and symbols to the pig, including “dirty kike,” “follow the money,” and “scum.”

His Nazi cosplay earned a rare rebuke from the Biden administration State Department, which described Waters as having a “long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”

In the wake of Oct. 7, Waters said Hamas’s terror attack was justified and accused Israel of “making up stories” about widespread rape and torture on that day.

“Was it justified for [Hamas] to resist the occupation? Yeah,” Waters said just a month after the attack. “They are absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967.”

Referring to reports that Hamas raped women, killed babies, and tortured civilians during its rampage through Israel, Waters downplayed the revelations.

“We don’t yet know what happened,” he said at the time. “Maybe there were some individual cases of civilians getting killed.”

Waters is also a leading supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, an anti-Semitic global campaign to wage economic warfare on the Jewish state.