Roger Waters and Piers Morgan ended up butting heads over Israel, Palestine and anti-Semitism in an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Waters has made his support for Palestine very public but has also been frequently accused of anti-Semitism, which he has strenuously denied on the basis that he takes issue with the state of Israel, not Judaism as a whole.
He has previously accused Israel of “abusing the term anti-Semitism to intimidate people like me into silence”, and back in November he speculated that the “fishy” attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 could have been a “false flag operation”.
Waters was also the subject of a documentary, The Dark Side Of Roger Waters, which was produced by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The film collates various incidents of alleged anti-Semitism levelled against the musician. Rogers later dismissed the project as “a flimsy, unapologetic piece of propaganda”.
Now, in a post on Instagram about the interview, Morgan said that he and Waters had come to blows. “Update: I interviewed Pink Floyd star Roger Waters yesterday, after calling him ‘the world’s dumbest rock star’ and a ‘complete and utter moron.’ It went as well as could be expected,” he wrote.
In the interview, Morgan and Waters got into a heated debate over what happened when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, which reignited the current conflict.
Waters proposed that there should be an investigation into what happened that day, particularly in relation to allegations of rape and sexual assault, which Hamas officials denied their officers were involved in.
“I’m not saying a part of the Palestinian resistance movement didn’t cross that wire fence. I am not saying that didn’t happen at all,” Waters said. “What I am saying is there is all this talk about does Israel have a right to defend itself why didn’t Israel defend itself that morning?”
“Why did they wait seven hours before they started machine-gunning everyone?” he questioned. “And all the great work that the Grayzone did in debunking all the filthy degusting lies that the Israelis told after October 7 about burning babies and women being raped.”
Morgan maintained that sexual violence was a part of the attack, a claim the United Nations has said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe happened.
“No, they weren’t,” Waters insisted. “There was no evidence. You can say anything that you want, but there is no evidence.”
He doubled down on his previous claim that Israel targeted its own civilians in a false flag operation. “All those piles of cars they were destroyed by Apache missiles from helicopters Hamas didn’t have helicopters,” he said.
“The people fighting on behalf of Palestine liberation have a legal and moral have a right to fight back against the oppressor,” he explained. “If someone invades your country, kicks all the people out of their home, steals everything and is stealing all your land and occupies all your land for 75 years you have an absolute right to armed resistance”.
Morgan later read out a tweet from Polly Gilmour, author and wife of Waters’ ex-bandmate David Gilmour, who he has been feuding with since the ’80s. Last year, Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson claimed that Waters was “antisemitic to [his] rotten core,” as well as “a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac”. Gilmour reposted that tweet as well, and told his followers that his spouse’s claims were “demonstrably true”.
Waters replied: “No comment. Oh, shut up… They’re public, and I’m private”.
Polly Gilmour’s comments were recently echoed by Disturbed frontman David Draiman -who is Jewish – who said he was “anti-Semitic to his rotten core”, as well as a “monster” and “deluded old freak”.
In February, he lashed out at Bono, describing him as “disgusting” and “a shit”, following the U2 frontman using his Sphere residency shows to pay respect to those killed during the October 7 attack at the Israeli music festival Supernova.
However, Eric Clapton has backed his outspokenness. “I love Roger. I love him. We are brothers and he goes his way about it, and it takes a lot of guts, and he suffers from it terribly. I’ve seen him sit on the window ledge in tears and say ‘It’s morning here in Manhattan and I’m in tears again’, you know?” he said in May.
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