The German police have announced this week their investigation of former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters for glorifying Nazis and antisemitic acts, both of which are illegal under German law.
The Jerusalem Post reports that Waters performed this week in Berlin and wore an SS uniform onstage, along with having a balloon pig featuring a Magen David alongside corporate logos like Shell floating through the audience. The concert began with a statement that he condemned antisemitism and had previously been declared to not be antisemitic by a Frankfurt court, but in addition to the pig and the uniform included things like flashing Anne Frank’s and George Floyd’s names during a discussion of “the people in power.”
Worth noting is that the Frankfurt court did not do what Waters claimed; what it found was that although Waters has previously spoken of “a dangerous Jewish lobby” in the United States and the UK that supposedly controls politics and has called Jews inhuman, he’d never actually glorified Nazis during a concert and therefore they couldn’t legally forbid him from playing a concert at a site of mass Jewish deportations in the 1930s.
The Anti-Defamation League, a group that exists to combat antisemitism, has curated a list of Waters’ antisemitic activities. While some of the items on the list pertain to his views on Israel and are therefore questionable in terms of how antisemitic they may be on their own—I say almost weekly that Benjamin Netanyahu is a giant fucking asshole—it’s clear from the rest of the list, including such bizarre ideas as “Jews don’t actually have any historical connection to the land in which their entire holy book is set,” that much of his anti-Israeli sentiment in context is simply a stand-in for saying “the Jews.”
Antisemitism is a problem on the left as well as the right, as this goes to show. It’s time we take out the trash and acknowledge the Jew-hatred among so-called progressive circles.