- PODCAST: Sylvan Adams speaks out after anti-Israel vandals smashed the McGill building with his name on it
Roger Waters listens to The CJN Daily? He purports to have heard my recent conversation with Ellin Bessner, based on what he wrote in response to the podcast episode about protesters vandalizing the construction site of the Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute on the campus of McGill University in Montreal on Oct. 7, 2024.
More likely, the anti-Israel musician—active as a frontman for the British band Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1982, followed by a solo career increasingly intertwined with political activism—has never actually listened to a podcast published by The Canadian Jewish News. It seems more likely that his virulent attack on me as a “looney Zionist billionaire” in a screed attached to his byline in a Canadian publication called Rabble (I had never heard of it before) was ghostwritten by a paid army of haters.
This is their job: to smear the good name of Israel and Jews around the world. Who’s paying them? Evidence points to Qatar and Iran—and more recently, China.
It’s not a small operation, either. They’ve been at this for two decades, and have spent trillions of dollars on this hate campaign. They hate Israel, but also generally all of Western civilization. A few minutes watching Al Jazeera, which is the propaganda arm of the Qatari emir, and you’ll understand what I’m saying.
Waters is merely their looney superstar spokesman, as his appalling and obsessive antisemitism is well known, and widely mocked—including by his former Pink Floyd bandmates, who owned the rights to continue the group without him for a decade (they later reunited for just one charity concert for poverty relief in 2005—but subsequently recorded and released a “one-off” benefit single for Ukraine in 2022, entirely without Waters) and increasingly disavowed his bigoted statements and hateful behaviour.
For the record, Roger, I plead guilty as charged to being a Zionist—or a Jewish patriot—who loves his people, their 3,500-year journey, and the blessings of the return of sovereignty in our indigenous homeland after two millennia of foreign occupation following our expulsion by the Romans. We faced Jerusalem in our prayers as we longed for our return. This is a beautiful story of a persecuted yet indestructible people, who achieved something seemingly impossible by returning home.
Roger, let’s discuss your statement that Israel is committing apartheid. This is an absurd charge, in a country where an Arab Muslim population of roughly 21 percent enjoys full rights as citizens. Arabs are members of the Knesset. They are present in the police and armed forces. They are doctors, lawyers and judges—including on our Supreme Court. There are even Israeli Arab diplomats in foreign countries.
This large minority enjoys freedoms that few Muslims in the region can boast—least of whom are the Palestinians, most of whom who live under a kleptocratic and totalitarian regime. President Mahmoud Abbas is in the 20th year of his four-year elected term, and he’s one of the richest men in the region. The rest, living in Gaza, enjoy life under genocidal terrorists who are equally kleptocratic in skimming off contributions from taxpaying donors in the west, to the point where many of their leaders are billionaires.
Your charge is also an insult to those who actually suffered under that brutal system in South Africa. Nelson Mandela admired Israel and the Jews—as did Martin Luther King Jr.—as a dispersed people that came back to build a modern society that contributes to the world community in a manner vastly disproportionate to its tiny population, in fields such as high tech (your iPhone wouldn’t work without the Israeli inventions inside), artificial intelligence, agriculture in the desert, desalinization, medicine (we provided Pfizer’s laboratory for its COVID-19 vaccine), environmental science, music, and even sport— where I am a major figure in Israel.
Altogether, this is hardly an effort to “whitewash” anything, least of which an apartheid that doesn’t exist in Israel. An apartheid system is practiced, however, elsewhere in our region. Like in Lebanon and in Syria, where Palestinians cannot get citizenship after 76 years in those countries, are forced to live in “refugee” camps, and are prohibited from seeking employment beyond those walls.
Roger, I must have missed your protests when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad killed 500,000 Muslims in his country. Or your rants against Chinese brutality of the Uyghurs. Or your articles decrying 6 million displaced Muslims in Sudan. Any criticism for those countries, Roger? Nope, as you don’t actually care about apartheid, Palestinians or Muslims. You just hate Jews.
Now let’s address your accusation that Israel is committing genocide. I think you need to look the word up in the dictionary, as you appear to lack a basic understanding of its powerful definition. In the year the state of Israel was founded, following a vote at the United Nations General Assembly (80 years ago this month—Nov. 29, 1947), the population of Gaza is estimated by historians to have been between 60,000 and 80,000. Today, it numbers more than 2 million. Hardly a genocide.
By contrast, the world Jewish population has not yet, to this day, recovered its 1938 pre-war numbers decimated by the Nazi Holocaust. That was genocide. Roger, you are therefore also a Holocaust denier.
Come clean: how much are you getting paid for this work to smear Israel and the Jewish people? Must be pretty good money, as your music career has surely paid you well.
But I’m happy that you also complained about me in a letter to McGill president Deep Saini. I’m sure he was very impressed, particularly as the rudely caustic and bombastic writing published under your name doesn’t endear you to many outside your echo chamber.
Finally, I hope that your two living ex-bandmates—guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason (keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008)—can seriously consider performing together one last time under the Pink Floyd name for my proposed commemorative concert in the location of the Nova festival in Reim, Israel, the site of the Oct. 7 massacre of young music lovers by genocidal Hamas terrorists who cruelly raped, tortured, slaughtered, and kidnapped them.
What was their sin? A desire to enjoy a party in the countryside, in their country.
I hope the two musicians agree, as it would be a powerful message heard around the world. But also something to spite you, dear Roger. When you call others racist—as appears to be your habit—you’re engaging in the psychological behaviour of projecting your own repugnant and obsessive behaviour.
Have a nice day.
- PODCAST: Sylvan Adams speaks out after anti-Israel vandals smashed the McGill building with his name on it
