Roger Waters. Calling for cultural boycott again
Photo: Merav Yudilovitch
Waters: Israel boycott is 'the way to go'
Former Pink Floyd frontman reveals he is behind letter to Stevie Wonder which led to cancellation of singer's participation in event for IDF soldiers. 'Israeli government runs an apartheid regime,' he adds
Roger Waters is calling for a boycott against Israel
– again: The former Pink Floyd frontman has revealed that he is the person who sent a letter to Stevie Wonder, urging him to cancel his participation in an event for IDF soldiers in Los Angeles in December 2012. Eventually, Wonder did call off
his gig.
"I wrote a letter to him saying that this would be like playing a police ball in Johannesburg the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. It wouldn’t be a great thing to do, particularly as he was meant to be a UN ambassador for peace."
Zionist Response
Following cancelation of Stevie Wonder performance for IDF, actress Noa Tishby and two pro-Israel organizations issue online petition calling for end to cultural ban on Jewish state
Waters was also upset that Wonder's cancellation was not reported anywhere in the mainstream media in the United States.
Boycotter. Roger Waters (Photo: AFP)
The remarks were made in an interview Rogers gave to the Electronic Intifada website, a non-profit, independent portal which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective.
Waters added that he had asked other fellow musicians to boycott Israel, but was not prepared to say who they were. "It was entirely private between me and them," he said.
He stated, however, that he intended to talk to Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, who assembled many well-known musicians to record Sun City, a protest song against apartheid in South Africa during the 1980s.
Waters, who performed in the village of Neve Shalom in Israel in 2006, says now that "I think that the kind of boycott that was implemented against the apartheid regime in South Africa back in the day is probably the most effective way to go because the situation is that the Israeli government runs an apartheid regime in Israel, the occupied territories and everywhere else it decides.
"Let us not forget that they laid waste to most of Lebanon around the time I started getting involved in this issue. They destroyed airports, hospitals, any public buildings they could," he added.
