Holocaust victims cannot be equated to journalists killed accidentally in a combat zone, critics of the anti-Israel singer stated.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Roger Waters was slammed Wednesday for equating Israelis with Nazis by comparing famed Holocaust victim Anne Frank to a Palestinian journalist accidentally killed recently by the IDF during a counter-terror operation.
Reactions came fast and furious after pictures spread on social media of the extremely antisemitic singer’s concert last week in Berlin. They showed a huge screen behind him projecting Frank’s name with the words: “Location – Bergen-Belsen, Germany; Crime – Being Jewish; Punishment – Death,” as well as Shireen Abu Akleh’s name, with the location being “Jenin, Palestine,” the crime noted as “being Palestinian,” and the same “punishment” as the teenager murdered in the German concentration camp.
“Good morning to everyone 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,” Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted.
Likud MK Danny Danon blasted him for the comparison to the Palestinian Al-Jazeerah journalist, who, he pointed out, was “shot while in an active combat zone.”
“Waters seeks to compare Israel to the Nazis,” he added. “He is disgracefully one of the biggest Jew haters of our time. And he is a worse musician than David Gilmour.”
During a battle last May with terrorists in the Palestinian city of Jenin in Samaria in which hundreds of bullets were fired at Israeli troops, Abu Akleh was inadvertently shot by one of the IDF soldiers while covering the clash as a journalist. The Palestinian Authority and Al Jazeerah charged that she was intentionally murdered, a claim the IDF vehemently denied, while apologizing for the accident.
The Stop Antisemitism organization called the comparison “sickening,” and asked in outrage, “How did Germany allow this to happen in 2023?!”
Waters, who is an extreme leftist and a BDS advocate, has made the comparison before, as the slides are part of his anti-establishment audio-visual show whose theme is that democracies like the U.S. and Israel are violent and suppressive.
He put on much the same performance last year at Madison Square Garden in New York, with clips also shown of police violence during Black Lives Matter protests in American cities and the flashing of names of police victims such as George Floyd, as well as messages such as “F*** the Occupation” and pictures of the security fence between Gaza and Israel.
At the Berlin concert, Waters was also seen dressed in an SS uniform and “firing” a dummy rifle. While it is illegal in Germany to display any Nazi symbols, several people defended Waters’ costume on Twitter by saying that the performer was simply “reenacting a scene” from a 1982 movie based on an album by the Pink Floyd band Waters fronted for years ago.