Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/28/23 Roger Waters Talks About Gaza and Debuts His New Song, Under The Rubble

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

Roger Waters returns to the show to discuss what’s happening in Gaza. Waters is horrified by what the Israeli government is doing. He explains why, presents how he thinks this needs to end and debuts his new song about the atrocities the people of Gaza are experiencing called Under the Rubble.  Discussed on the show: “My Heart is Heavy: To Whom It May Concern, Please STOP” (Palestine Chronicle) The General's Son by Miko Peled “Hamas Committed Documented Atrocities. But a Few False Stories Feed the Deniers” (Haaretz) Glenn Greenwald interviews Roger Water Roger Waters co-founded the band Pink Floyd. Waters has been very active in antiwar and other activism for many years. He has been outspoken against Western involvement in the war in Ukraine, a defender of Palestinian rights, and one of the leading advocates of freedom for Julian Assange.  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You'll find my full interview archive,

almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org, and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right. I'm very happy to welcome back to the show. The great Roger Waters, of course, lead singer and frontman of the legendary rock band, Pink Floyd, as well as a great activist for peace in Palestine. Welcome back to the show, sir.

How are you doing? I live yet, Scott. I'm pretty disturbed emotion. because of the genocide obviously and so I live somewhat on a knife edge from day to day with all of that but I've been home in Hampshire in England for for Christmas with my lovely wife and I've had some my couple of my kids here and blah so we wake up every morning and look at the news and wonder and scratch our heads particularly those of us who've been

anti-war like you like your good self for some time and but we wonder you know we wonder we are as I posted the other day that we are in the middle of an existential battle for the human soul right now and occasionally these times come upon us and we get a chance to nail our colors to the mast and decide whether we care about the human soul, if there is such a thing. We all come from different perspectives. I'm sort of what I call a radical atheist. So anything to do with Yahweh and the Abrahamic religions or any religions, really, it's an interesting conversation for me philosophically and intellectually.

But normally, when we're not living through a genocide, I don't get that emotionally involved in those metaphysical questions about life and death. But witnessing this genocide that the Israel state of Israel is committing on the people of Palestine now, it's impossible not to eat, sleep, breathe, and weep it 24 hours a day, seven days a week for as long as it proceeds. So I'll stop talking now. I tend to ramble. Well, believe me, I know exactly how you feel And anybody, I don't know about people watching TV, but anybody on Twitter seeing the images out of the Gaza Strip has got to be just beside themselves. This is the ugliest damn thing in the world, Roger, going on here. So let me put it this way.

You know what? I mean, you're a superstar. There are a lot of people who, they might never pay attention to this at all except for the fact that it's you talking. So what if someone's brand new to this? What if someone was just raised on? Well, of course, we're with the Israelis. They're our friends and they're whiter and they're the West. And on the other side is the East, the Muslims, the other, the bad guys.

What more could they need to know than that, sir? Well, everything that isn't the narrative that has been spoon-fed them since they first tried to get a job or did anything really in life, they've been fed this propaganda from a ruling class that wants them to believe that narrative and wants them to believe that the world is full of their enemies. And their enemies are whoever it is that the powers that be choose. At the moment, it's Russia and China and the Palestinians.

But it could be anybody. It can be anyone. Anybody who is other and can be described as that. The fact is that what they might, if they were, if anybody was interested, I might suggest to them that they look in. mirror and they look at themselves and they look into their own eyes and they ask them this question, how would I feel if it was me? This is a question that I often put to people. And you're talking about people in the music industry. This is a question that many years ago now, quite a few years

ago, I put to Dionne Warwick because she picked me out in a series of tweets that she put out at a certain point, saying how I was bullying her by writing to her and telling her that she was, should join the BDS or that she should at least heed the call from the Palestinian people for us to not cross a picket line and to apply a cultural boycott to Israel. What was interesting in her case was, I'd never said a word to Deon Worry. She was picking up on things that I had said, generally, and to letters that I've made public of things that I've written to other people, you know, like Radiohead or Bon Jovi or, you know, or Elton John, but I'd never written to her. And yet she picked me out and said that I'd been bullying her and that she would play

her music wherever, and music is the language of peace, and blah, blah, blah. So what I said to Dionne was I looked her up and discovered that she would have been born in 1940s. So she was eight years old when the Knajba happened. I said, tell me how you would have felt. You're an eight year old girl living in the suburbs of Chicago. There's a bang on the door one day and there's a boat there in uniform

you know, with a gun and he tells you there's the road, go to Canada. You can't live here anymore. But hang on we've lived, this is my dad's house and it was his father's house before that. And we've been I didn't ask you who you

were and what your history were. Leave. now and you're still trying to talk to him and then then your father comes down the stairs and says who are you what are you doing talking to my daughter like bang and your father's dead on the floor the guy in the uniform shot him and he says what now do who's that up so oh that's my grandparents do you want them dead on the floor out now how would you feel deal because that is the position that 750,000 Palestinians found themselves seeing on May the 15th or within one or two weeks after that date in 1948 when you were eight years old. How would you feel if it was your olive tree, your grandmother and father, your cousins, your parents, your house, your bed, your

front door. How would you feel? And of course, they deal with Warren has never, she, that obviously, maybe she never read it. I've no idea. And if she did, maybe she thought, what's he talking about? That didn't happen in Chicago. No, it didn't happen in Chicago. But what if it did? Can you put yourself in the position of the other and say, how would I fear? Why can't they do that to you in Chicago? Because you have rights. You have property rights. You have rights under the law. Your father probably owned that house. If he didn't, He was renting it legally. It was your house.

Nobody could come in with a gun and kill you to make you move out. That is the position that the Palestinian people have been in since 1948. So anybody that you're talking about, how might I persuade any of these people? How do you feel? I wrote a song last night. I could play it to you in a minute. It's the shortest song I've ever written. is one minute and 54 seconds long.

I sat down here at this, I'm sitting at a keyboard in my studio, right? Then I started to sing. And I found that I was singing willy-nilly, the song of a child trapped under the rubble of a house in Gaza. So it's very, very short tone. It's just a child singing to her father, please take me home. Would you sing it for us? I can't sing it for you because I'm not set up to sit. I'll play it for you.

Yeah. Well, hang on. Sure. All right. Hang on. Hang on. Let me just. Okay, here we go.

Papa, I want to go home now. Papa, please take me home. Mama, please tell me I'm dreaming. And I'll wake up somewhere and I'm going to be along. Mama, the star kid. Daddy, stop breathing. Then, oh, ma'am. Hey, guys. I've had a lot of great webmas over the years.

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Though not necessary, it helps if the coffee tastes good. Well, Moondos Artisan Coffee does taste good. They get the best beans from all around the world, and they don't burn them. Support the show and support your brain at Moondoseartisancoffee.com. Just click the link at the right margin at Scott Horton.org. It's anti-war radio. with the great roger waters that was his latest song you wrote last night do you have a name for it yet yeah it's called under the rubble yeah and there's a lot of that and so let's talk about the current

bombing campaign ethnic cleansing campaign genocide in the gaza strip is one of the features of this war i guess because people have crammed into such a small space nobody lives in a little house everything is a concrete three or four or five story high rise and so everything is real bombs they're just collapsing tons of concrete rubble onto people and it's kind of a recurring feature of this campaign is people's hands and feet stuck out people buried alive people trapped still alive obviously their hands moving their voices crying out with tons of rubble on top of them where there's zero chance that anyone is ever going to be able to get to them who are just stuck and left to die in there.

They're buried alive. Yeah. And most of them, children. I mean, the highest percentage of children, most of the people trapped in the dark alone dying are children. And they're doing that. The Israeli government is not the Jewish people, not Judaism, not the Jews, don't start anybody even breathing that this has anything to do with Jews.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of the Zionists who are committing this evil genocide are people of the Jewish faith, but we have to assume that they have been propagandized, just like Dionne Warwick, who didn't understand all. those years ago why there was a cultural boycott of Israel. Why are we in the BDS movement will make and then the anti-war movement were making a fuss. We're making a fuss because we, well Israel is slightly different. The anti-war movement obviously is because we object to the idea of killing people for profit, which is what war is about. When we look at history, when we do the reading, when we study the wars, certainly since the Second World War,

they are all about making profit and stealing land from people. They're all about secular colonialism and about neoliberal economics. That's what it's for. It's nothing to do with a fight between good and evil. It's about making money. It's a fascinating article by Jeffrey Sachs yesterday morning. There have been many fascinating articles by Jeffrey Sachs. I'm sure Dion would look at me and go, Jeffrey who?

Because she's never heard of Jeffrey Sachs. But Dionne Warwick has probably never listened to a conversation about anything important in her life. And many of us don't. And that's why we're susceptible to the. nonsense that's written in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Yellow Times and the mainstream media and MSNBC and folks news and all of this mainstream media because it is that we are living in 1984 these are all the tools of Big Brother and they're all really they're just outlets for propaganda of the ruling class who wishes to maintain this horror

that we live through but we at least I'm living I'm living through it by a river in Hampshire in England through this Christmas my brothers and sisters in Palestine

are living with their children buried under rubble in the dark which is what that tiny little song is about because I can't let it sleep I come in here and what can I do next

you know and I follow Twitter a bit and I look at I look at social media and see what comfort I can find. And I do find some comfort from the fact that it's quite clear now that we are many. We are a huge majority globally now of the people who say, no, this is wrong, completely wrong. Just because Joe Biden is denying it doesn't mean a thing. Joe Biden is psychotic, obviously, and he's clearly also a dotard.

He has no idea what's going on around him. He can hardly climb the steps into an airplane. He can't follow a conversation. He can't have a debate with anybody because he can't remember more than about three words. The three words being, I fully support Israel. That's four words. Excuse me. yeah nobody even knows who's in charge either i don't make a joke of it because it's not funny but

no it's important the president of the world empire everyone agrees everyone on this block knows whether they know politics or not they know he's too old to be in charge and wonder who really is in charge is it blinkin is it solvin it can't be blinking because they keep sending the head of the CIA to go negotiate in his place so there's no confidence in him is it Hillary Clinton's guy, Jake Sullivan that's in charge? It can't be Lloyd Austin. That ding bat, you know, no one knows. So it is a huge topic.

But, you know, it is anti-war radio. Scott Horton talking with Roger Waters here. You mentioned 1984, and it raises, to me, the idea of the double-think, where you have to believe this and that at the same time, even though they completely contradict each other. And it seems like the big one right now is we're hunting Hamas. We're destroying Hamas. These guys are, and I agree with this, about one click to the left of Al-Qaeda. They deliberately butcher civilians, including, in this case, an extended family member of mine,

was caught up and killed by them in this thing. And so the Israeli take is, well, we're hunting bad guys. At the same time, they are not either. They've killed far more than 20,000 people, maybe 25, and the vast majority of them, even according to the Israelis, by the way, people say, where do you get those numbers? The Israelis agree with the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers. They said to Reuters that we agree, and they said, hey, but look, at least one third of the people were killing our combatants.

What? In other words, they concede that two-thirds of the people that they're killing are not combatants. And of course, we know that's much worse than that. Yeah, they lie. They lie and lie and lie and lie, but they always have. They've never veered from the lie that they've been telling since the 1920s. about Palestine, which is that it's a land without people.

They're still trying to tell that same lie. It was the lie that was popularized by Golda Meyer back in the 50s, whenever it was, you know, a people with no land or, yeah, a land with no people for a people with no land. It's just a lie. It's an outright bare-faced lie. The problem with Zionism and with the settler-colonialist movement of Zionism, The huge problem with it is that they decided that they wanted to colonize a land that was full of people, full of Arab people, some of whom were of the Jewish faith, very few, about 10% of the people who actually lived in the Holy Land were Jewish back in the 20s and 30s.

and even moving, there were a few more Jews came in, but basically that land was invaded by Ashkenazi Jewish people from Northern Europe. They have nothing to do, no roots there, nothing to do with it. But they, and they colonized it. With the connivance, I have to say, and I'm deeply ashamed of this, as an Englishman, of the UK, mainly, with the protestation, stations of Lord Balfour back in 2000, I mean in 1917, obviously, with the Balfour Declaration. Though at least Lord Balfour at the time when he wrote his famous letter to Lord Rothschild, at least he had the grace in it to say, save that, there should be no infringement on the political or religious rights of the indigenous, non-Jewish population of Palestine.

Well, they didn't stick very closely to that, did they? not never mind property rights or religious rights what about the right to life and here they are now they've murdered what 30,000 of them in the last seven weeks and they're going to go on until they've killed that's their stated goal is to go on until they've killed them all or kicked them out into the desert in Egypt but got rid of them why because they want their land they are stealing their land and their olive trees and their houses. I mean, it's extraordinary and they've been getting away with it. Why? Because it's been convenient to the empire that is the United States of America and its lack is in the European community to have a military base in the middle of the Middle East, which is what Israel is. And so we all, you and I and all, you and I, and all, all the rest of us in the anti-war movement, or the BDS, all the pro-Palestinian freedom

movement, have to stand up to them in whatever way we can. And we are, and we are outnumbering them by a huge percentage. We are becoming very, very many, and they're becoming very, very few. The USA Empire and the European nations represent, what, 1% of it, or some very, very small percentage of the world's population, maybe a bit more than that. I don't want, don't quote me on that because I haven't done the sums, but we should do the sums because it's a fairly small number. But what can we do? Or we can only do this. I can talk to you. I talked on Russian television a few days ago and people are going, are you crazy? You can't speak on Russia one or whatever

the TV station was. People will accuse you, they're already accusing me of being a Putin puppet or Russia folk, not Russia phobia, Russia lover or, you know, whatever you want to call it. Well, the Russian people

of my brothers and sisters. All this hating Russia stuff is crazy. It's absolutely insane trying to make Russia the enemy. I mean, who defeated the Nazis in the Second World War. Russia did. It wasn't the Americans coming in off to Pearl Harbor.

It wasn't the, you know, brave little Brits on their island off the north coast of Europe. It was the Russians. They destroyed the Wehrmacht in defending their motherland. Thank you, Russian people. I noticed, even if Joe Biden didn't. Well, on, back to Palestine for a minute here, you know, you wrote this piece for the Palestine Chronicle shortly after the war broke out in October where you said the solution here is the one state solution. Yeah. The two states hasn't worked. And essentially, I think you say Israel, as it was created by the founding generation there, was a non-viable state. The current situation proves that. And so, in other words, recognize. that Israel already did annex all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip way back in 67, call it

one state and demand equal rights for everyone. That's your position? Yeah, I modified that to a certain extent in interviews that I did last week or the week before saying one state or two states, it's not really my business, but it kind of is because the Israelis have made it completely clear now that they have no interest in the two-state solution and never did. And they've tried to sell the lie and served the Americans over and over again, that somehow the Palestinians turned down the 67 borders, which is a complete bare-faced lie. No, they didn't. The Israelis did.

And if you read Miko Pilead's book, The General's son, and the story is his father. and he was very high up in the Israeli military in 1967 and spoke this is all a matter of historical fact because it's in the minutes of the meetings of the Israeli cabinet from early in the year of 1948 or after the Six Day War. Anyway, yeah, I think one state's probably the best idea, but of course what stands in the way of this is the idea is the idea that the Bible is actually true, and it's a historical document that cannot be spoken to, and that somehow we're meant to believe that God decided to give the Holy Land, as we call it, to the children of Israel forever.

And it doesn't matter what's happened in the 4,000 years since, or the fact that people have lived there for thousands and thousands of and that they've lived, they lived under Ottoman rule for thousands of years where Jews and Christians and Druze and agnostics and atheists and Muslims and Hindus all lived together. Completely, well, not completely content because they were living either under the Romans or the Ottomans or some must, but they were allowed to practice their religions and be whatever they And there was no idea that one religion ruled over all the others and was supremacist. This is a recent idea that the Zionists came up with. And it's untenable.

And it has failed. And the only way for it to even continue is via this genocide. And we will not allow it. That is not the way that a state can proceed. We wouldn't let the Nazis do it. in 1939, and we will not let the Israelis do it now. And it's exactly the same thing. And all this nonsense about, oh, you can't bring the Holocaust into the, you can't

not bring the Holocaust into the conversation. They're doing it now to the Palestinians. They're trying to do to the Palestinians exactly what the Third Reich, Hitler and and Goering and Goebbels and so on were trying to do to the Jews. population in northern Europe in the Second World War and in the 30s before the Second World War. Sorry, go on. I'm sorry, we're just real short on time. So I wanted to give you a chance real quick at the end here, Roger, if you could, to talk about BDS.

You mentioned it earlier in the show, kind of as an aside, but I think a lot of people have never heard of that before, but it's obviously very important to the mission here. Yeah. Well, the BDS movement started in 2005, somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, and it was dreamt up by the whole of Palestinian civil society getting together and trying to figure out a way to affect their possible futures, and they decided to try and organize boycott, which is the BDS, divestment and sanctions. to persuade the Israeli and success of Israeli governments to change their policies from one,

from their supremacist policies that they have carried out since May 1948, and to end the occupation of the land of Palestine, which certainly the territories that we call the occupied territories and Gaza were occupied in 1967 in the June war, in 1967. Okay, so what we do is I, and if I can persuade her, Dionne Warwick, or if I could persuade the maybe Radiohead or Bon Jovi, they don't agree with this, okay? Just say, we will not perform in Israel. We are part of a cultural boycott, okay? And people say, We will not accept academics, for instance. I will not accept a prize from an Israeli university or anything that's sponsored by or supported by the Israeli government or financed by.

So this is true as well of things that happen outside Israel where there are sometimes that have money poured into them by the Israeli lobby in order to whitewash the things that Israel done. They are trying, as we speak, to whitewash the genocide that they're committing impover. So that's boycott. Okay. Divestment is we try and persuade firms, and it takes 20 years. I mean, this started in 2005, so we're, what, 18 years in, only 18 years in. But Puma, for instance, who make shoes for tennis players and football players, they are just beginning to crack.

hit the edges after a long campaign because they have been sponsoring Israeli sports at Puma. So they target Caterpillar, obviously, we've been speaking to people all the time, trying to say divest from Caterpillar, they supply the canine caterpillar tractors, bulldozers, that they knock down all the Palestinians' houses with and stuff like sanctions, well, we've got hardly anywhere so far with sanction. That would be getting foreign governments to impose financial sanctions on the state of Israel in order to try and pursue, exactly like the sanctions that the United States has been putting on Russia after the invasion, for instance, of Ukraine for its own reasons. That's exactly those kind of sanctions. So that's what it is, boycott

divestment and saying it's nonviolent. The BDS movement has never tried. to tell people what the outcome of all this will be, whether it would be one state or two state, they've always said, this is none of our business. But what is our business is that there has to be some move away from the perceived plans of the state of Israel for the whole of historical Palestine to become Israel. And then to include bits of Syria and bits of Egypt, i.e. Gaza and the Golan Heights. They say, no, this can't, this cannot be allowed to do this. It's very, very bad for everyone else in the world. So that's what BDS is. And I know a lot of the people who run it. And it's actually, I may not seem like it now, but it's been quite successful in raising awareness. That's why

the state of Israel, and it used to be called the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, who used to run the Hasbroa, which is the explaining to the rest of the world, why everything that they're doing is fine, and that they're a democracy, they're a democracy, obviously. You cannot, it's now generally accepted that it is an apartheid state. This is a party. It's a state just like South Africa was, except that in South Africa, it was Dutch white people who were considering themselves to be superior to the whole. black population of South Africa. And in this case, it's some people who call themselves Jewish. And they probably do adhere to some extent to the religion that is Jewish. But they've developed a state where they say that if you are Jewish, you are superior to all the indigenous people

who live there, who are not Jewish. So your superiority is defined by your. religion. And this is something that the rest of us in the world do not agree with and will not countenance. It's too easy to live in 1984 if or, well, it doesn't matter. Brave New World I was going to say, which is a slightly different novel, but it's another novel about a dystopian future where a ruling class set themselves out and they control the population. by one means or another. In our case, we are controlled by propaganda and by the mainstream media. Yeah, it's a brave new world until you step out of line and then it's 1984 real quick. Hey, let me ask you about this. You know, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal from a couple of days ago that says that Biden talked Netanyahu out of a major strike against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon just a few days after the war began.

And they said American intelligence did not back up Israeli fears about what. Hezbollah was about to do. But we have the Houthis who are also Shiites in Yemen now firing off missiles. They say in defense of the Palestinians, we've had many strikes by, they say Shiite militias, I guess believably, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq against American forces there. And it seems like, you know, not to do too much of an alarmist, slippery slope type argument, but there is some real risk of a regional war breaking out here where essentially all the Sunni leaders are sock puppets of the American Empire, right? All those kings and emirs and sheiks. And it's left to the Shiite alliance backed by Iran to stick up for the Palestinians.

But George Bush gave him Iraq. And so Obama made Syria more dependent on them than ever before. And so that Shiite alliance is tighter and more powerful than it's ever been in 20 years, thanks to the United States of America, largely doing what the Israelis wanted them to do in fighting these wars. And so I don't know. I wonder if you thought much about that or if you'd like to raise the alarm about that, too, that this is not just the horror of what's happening to the Palestinians here. This could really spiral out of control. Well, you may well be right. That's not my area of expertise, Scott. And I don't really want to go down that road. There are people who would be very happy to go down that.

World War III is I'm prepared to get frightened about that, mainly because the most rabid Zionists in the world are actually Christian Zionists, and there's an awful lot of them evangelical Christians I'm talking about in the United States of America, who they believe, or many, many of them believe, and it could be as many as 70 or 80 million people in the United States, believe that the fact that there is a state called Israel now means that the prophecy in the Bible is coming closer to fruition, that prophecy being about the second coming of Jesus. And for that to happen, I'm told, we're going to have to have an enormous battle in the Middle East,

in the Holy Land, which is Armageddon. And Armageddon will signal the end of times. And Jesus, apparently, according to the evangelical Christians, is going to come down from heaven in the Second Coming. And all of those evangelical Christians, including Mike Pence and George Bush and whoever else it is, are all going to join hands with Jesus and fly off to heaven. And all the Jews are going to and heretics and agnostics or atheists like me are going to bone in hell for all eternity. well oh my goodness we're going to have to turn the whole of the midwest into a loony bin to keep these people in if this is if this is where we the thinking that we're basing our foreign policy on is that nonsense yeah because i'm sorry if i hurt some of the feelings of christian evangelicals but this

is arrant nonsense but you know i'm and i can say that But that's my act of face. Hey, you guys. Did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director. So, yeah. 13 of them now, including my four.

We published five more in 2023. Lori Calhoun and Tom Woods books about the COVID regime. Joe Solis Mullin on the fake China threat. Jim Bovard's latest last rights. And our managing editor, Keith Knight's, domestic imperialism. And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts

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That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's r-rbi.com. You'll be glad you did. well you know one of the one of the major neoconservative leaders of a previous generation bill crystal's father irving was asked about this policy because the israel lobby bought jerry fall well an airplane in 1980 or something like that and they were joining forces with the christian right under ronald regan big time at that time and crystal was asked geez you really want to line up with these people who think that the end of the world they're looking forward to is jesus coming back and nuking everybody or what this all this crazy stuff and irving crystal said hey it's their theology but it's our is real so they can believe whatever stupid garbage they want but we get what we want out of them suckers simple as that as cynical as could be roger yeah well i'm sure it was and it is my concern is that this doesn't help the kid i'm writing the song about under the rubble in gaza

tonight and tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that because however much world public opinion is turning against the state of Israel and against the United States of America like that it's going to go what are they doing what and it's making everybody is rethinking hang on a minute I thought you got you guys always said you believed in democracy and freedom and human rights and all that. clearly just saying, oh, sorry, we don't, actually. We don't believe in any of those things, not even faintly. If we did, obviously we would have put a stop to this genocide, the day it started.

On October the 8th, we would have. We said, whoa, let's find out what happened on October the 7th. I'm very sorry that you lost a family member or relation. But what the Israelis say happened on October the 7th is a crock of nonsense. All the lies about beheaded babies and raped women did not happen as far as we can tell. Let's put it this way. There is no evidence for any of the crimes that they claim that the fighters of Hamas are responsible.

Well, and Harretz ran a big special saying that all of the worst stories that came out were not true. And there's no question that they machine gun women and children. and especially at that raven in the kibbutzs. But the rapes, the cutting the woman's stomach open, the throwing the baby in the oven, cutting all the baby's heads off and hanging them from a clothesline,

and all of those worst atrocities were completely made up. And the rape. And the mass rapes, yep. Well, this is huge. Any rape, all the rape stories were made up. There is no evidence to support a single baby being killed except one by accident. And when they're not even certain

that that was Hamas accidental fire and not friendly far. And even this little girl that they used as the poster child for the propaganda for the war, it turned out was killed in friendly fire by an IDF tank. Exactly. Yasmin Porot's testimony. She was there. She was there.

She was in that house. She was talking to the Israeli gunners and explaining where the hostages were and where the Israelis who were in the house were, when that little girl was fried. Yeah, it is. It's terrible. But they still, but they still, they're not, they haven't come clean.

My friend Gideon Levy wrote a piece in Ha'arets saying to me, Roger Waters, condemn the Hamas atrocity. But he's never turned around now and say, you know what, Roger, all he did was, all I did was in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. I said, I've looked at this. This was on the 11th, I think, three days after it happened. And I said, there's something very fishy about October the 7th. I would really like to know what actually happened.

That's all I said. Oh, my goodness, do you think I'd torn down the Statue of Liberty? No, I said, I think this is fishy. I want to know what happened. How did they get across the border? Why weren't they there? What happened to the Israeli defense force? And we still don't know the answers to that quick.

But what we do know is the answers to the questions about the burned babies and the washing lines and the wrecks. We know. And they are not, even Gideon Levy is not coming back and saying, you know what? Something happened, but we don't know what it was. And now the Israelis have admitted that they machine gunned and hell far missile, innocent people. on that day, that they were responsible for deaths. They haven't said how many, but they've admitted that friendly fire was the cause of a lot. But nobody is prepared to say, well, let's see what actually happened.

And there is a lot of eyewitness report coming back from hostages who've been released. And then, of course, you're not hearing a single word of any of that in the mainstream media in the United States. the United States. I'm talking about women hostages who've come back and said, the Hamas fighters treated us with the ultimate respect. The Hamas fighters protected us with their own bodies when we were, when we were under bombing attack. Things like that, like just, no, obviously we have to destroy Hamas is a lie.

What they mean is we are going to ethnically cleanse. the Palestinian people, all of them, whether they're resistance fighters or councillors, town councillors, members of the local town, which Hamas are, they are the ruling political party. So it's to say Hamas as if that's only resistance fight. We know there's a Qasan is the armed wing of Hamas. And so some of them are resistance fighters. And let us not forget, they have an absolute right to resist the occupation. It's written in the Geneva conventions. It's part of international law. Israel doesn't have the right to issue a parking ticket in Gaza and they're murdering the whole population. What? Do we believe in the law or

human right? Anything? No, we don't. We believe in genocide and it disgusts me because I'm part of the we. I'm an English reds. No, I actually, I live in America, but I'm an Englishman. My government is supporting the genocide. It breaks my heart. Yeah. Well, of course, the American government too out in front on the whole thing. But, you know, on the attack itself, hundreds of civilians killed, even low hundreds, two, 300 or 400 or whatever it was, would have been plenty excuse or reason for the Israeli government to launch an assault to try to kill leaders of Hamas or Hamas maybe entirely. But it took all of these embellished tales of Belgian babies on bayonets to get the people to support the full scale reaction that they got. Yeah, that's right, Scott.

That's why I love Gideon Levy. He's a friend of mine. He's a very old friend of mine. you've got to come clean and say that was all lies. Don't leave those stories printed there and not refute them. Or if it wasn't, let's do, let's have the investigation and find out what actually happened. They're talking about burying all those cars. The Israeli government. They talk about burying the cars. So they're talking about destroying any evidence that there might be.

Let's just destroy it. We'll stick with the narrative. babies on clothed lines and all of that even though they know its lies it's made up and in fact

they just ran a story in Newsweek two or three days ago reiterating all these lies weeks and weeks after Hararets ran their big story debunking it all

and they're just as you say they're just going to stick with it anyway now here's one more topic I think if we can squeeze this in here you did mention this

a little bit previously and quite honestly Roger, I wouldn't want to, you know, insult you with this in a way it's beneath all of us to even have to engage. And yet at the same time, it's not just you. It's happening to a lot of regular people. Anyone who sticks up for the Palestinians get smeared as an anti-Semite. And so I was wondering, you know, maybe if only on behalf of these other people who don't

quite have your status to fight back from, if you could stick up for them a little bit. And because aren't you as sick as I am of people's motives being impugned when all you're doing is sticking up for innocent civilians being exploded to death here? Well, obviously, I am, yeah. And, I mean, I've just done 100 gigs of a show of mine called This Is Not a Drub. I did 43 in the United States and Canada and a few in Mexico. And then I did another 40-odd in Europe. And then I've just done 16 stadium gigs in South America. and all over the Israeli lobby has been trying to get my shows cancelled

on the grounds that I'm spreading hatred. No, no, I'm criticizing the state of Israel. That has now been exploded, I think. But again, the shit that's been thrown at you, some of it always sticks. And people will go on believing this nonsense forever. And there's nothing I can do about it. As I said on the, and my interview I did with Glenn, right, with Glenn Greenwald.

We had a long conversation and it was good. And I'm sorry I've been so shouty today raising my voice, but I'm particularly rattled by all these dead women and children and men in Gaza. So but, and I said to him, Glenn, I said, there's only one person in the world who actually knows whether Roger Waters is an anti-Semite or not. And that's Roger Waters. because I live in this body. This is my heart.

This is my brain. I know the thoughts that I have on what I have. You couldn't find anybody less against the Jews, if that's what anti-Semitism means, than me. There was some fucking schmuck, idiot, ex-saxapone player, made a film with somebody or other explaining how it was a raging Jew-rated, how he had to pretend he wasn't Jewish to stay in the band and blah, blah, blah, blah. I employ, I employ, I think I counted at the last count,

165 people permanent in my circus family. I haven't the faintest idea what any of their religion is. And I couldn't care less. I sometimes find out, like when I did the wall show all over the world from 1910 for three years without stopping. About two thousand away through it, some kid came up to me, one of our carpenters.

And he said, can I have a word with you? And he did. And it turns out he was Jewish. And he was also Israeli. And he wanted to have a conversation because this is back in 2013, 2010 to 2010,

10 years ago. And where my position was further out, if you like, than it is now. Now people are at least a bit better. well so we had the conversation and it was great and we didn't agree about absolutely everything but he understood what my position was after and when he when he left at the end when the war tour was over he wrote me a lovely letter saying what a wonderful experience it had been

and blah blah blah blah and we still are in touch with one and blah blah blah and so it's fine I don't mind I couldn't care but somebody during that I had a conversation with a production manager about that and he mentioned somebody else who has been working with me for 20 years right and i'm not going to mention his name but they said he's good well his first name he's called sean somebody or other right and he said sean blah blah blah and i went why are you bringing him up and he said well because he's jewish i said he's not he said yeah he is i said good god i had no idea i've worked with a guy for 20 fucking years it would never cross me my mind ever. It's just not who I am. So I know it's all bullshit. And obviously to accuse

my friend Susan Sarandon. No, my friend Susan Sarandon is a humanist like I am. All of us, Scott, we're people who care about our brothers and sisters and we care about them irrespective of their religion or their ethnicity or their nationality. It never enters our mind. I never does mine. I know it never does. I know it never does Susan Sarendon's. And I know it never does.

Naomi Wimborn and Drisie, he used a Jewish friend of mine in England, who's been thrown out of the Labour Party for being an anti-Semite. You can't make this bullshit up. What it does mean is that people like Kea Stama have no, idea at all. None. What love is, what anti-Semitism is, what brotherhood is, nothing, what democracy is, what the law is. No idea. Keir Stammer, the leader. He has, no, Jeremy Corbyn had an idea. That's why they got rid of him. Because he was a humanist. He is a humanist. Like me, like you, like Susan Sarin. Like hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of us in the West, millions even, and billions of us all over the

world. We do know what love is. We do know what democracy is. We do know what empathy is. We do understand what comradeship and brotherhood is. These people have no idea. And they never will, unfortunately. All right, Roger. Well, I'm out of time. I'm sorry I have to run to my next interview, but i have to tell you it was the thrill of my life when i got to meet you when you came and played the show here in austin and i'm glad you guys came and um so honored to have you back on the show and to have you spend an hour with us here today so thank you very much thank you very much for recording this little song of mine and i'm sure you will play it on the show and i hope people respond favorably to it because they're our children they are our children that they're

I'm very honored that you'd give me the chance to debut your new song on L.A. Radio today. It's really great. All right. Thanks, President. Thank you. That's a wrap for me for today and for the year, and that's 25 years on the radio, 20 years of 6,000 interviews, and now 13 years on KPFK, where I'm here every Thursday from 230 to 3 on 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Happy New Year.