Yesterday we saw how, in December 2013, musician Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, compared Israel to Nazi Germany – only to be taken to school, as it were, by Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, who in an epic takedown for the New York Observer spelled out to Waters the error of his ways.
Alas, Waters didn’t care to learn. In October of last year, he published a rant in Huffington Post blaming the West, especially the U.S., for the plight of Palestinian children. This piece, too, drew an articulate reply, this time from Israeli writer Lilac Sigan. “Here is a man,” lamented Sigan, “who seems to be going out of his way in order to do something good, and doesn’t realize that if anything, he’s doing the exact opposite.” She explained:
Lilac Sigan
In Waters’ world there is no Hamas, and this terror organization doesn’t live by its sword, doesn’t swear to death and violence, and doesn’t rule the Gaza strip with primitive Shariya law. In the imaginary world he presents there are no rockets, and Hamas hasn’t fired thousands of them at Israel this summer, aiming at 75% of the Israeli population which was saved by the Iron Dome. In his world Hamas has not exploited Palestinian funds in order to purchase arms and build military tunnels with supplies that were intended to build Palestinian homes. In his world Hamas doesn’t exploit the UN facilities for military purposes, and doesn’t hold public street executions of Palestinians who dare to protest….
Sigan was, as it happens, wrong about one thing here: Hamas does exist in Waters’s world; and as far as he’s concerned, they’re the good guys. In a 2012 speech at the UN, delivered in his capacity as a member of the now discredited Russell Tribunal, he stood up for Hamas, which he depicted not as terrorist thugs but as victims of Israeli “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupation” who actions are merely responses to Israeli oppression and violence.
But back to Sigan: how is it, she asked, that with “senseless and brutal slaughtering” taking place all over the Middle East, and “with 200,000 butchered in Syria alone in the past 3 years,” Waters’s gaze stays fixed on Israel? “Just this week in Cairo,” she wrote,
Some of Waters’s friends in Hamas
donors pledged 5.4 billion dollars to rebuild the destroyed parts of Gaza. But how much of this funding will go into rebuilding Hamas and lining its leaders’ pockets instead of being used for the benefit of the Palestinians? How much of it will be used to redig the network of terror tunnels into Israel? And will forced child labor be used again in order to complete this project, in which at least 160 palestinian children tragically died the last time around? A mechanism had been agreed in Cairo with UN involvement, to ensure that international funding not be diverted to finance the rebuilding of Hamas’s military capabilities. But sources in Gaza said there was no practical way to control how such money would be spent. If one truly cares for Palestinian children, all of these facts should be a huge concern….
Waters declared that Palestinians should enjoy the same freedoms that he enjoys. That’s a very nice thought which no-one could disagree with, but one should remember that no Palestinian, whether child or adult, will enjoy any freedom at all as long as Hamas is in charge and doesn’t change its ways.
But Sigan’s piece didn’t wake Waters up, either. On the contrary. Even as he’s been presented over and over again with the plain facts about Israel’s predicament and Hamas’s ideology, he’s clung more and more stubbornly to his black-and-white picture of the situation – and attacked, with increasing vitriol, those members of his profession who have dared to go against him by performing in Israel. We’ll get to that tomorrow.
Yesterday we started looking at the showbiz branch of the movement to boycott Israel – and at the man who may be its most passionate member, Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters. In 2013, his comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany inspired Rabbi Schmuley Boteach to pen an eloquent, informed response. “Mr. Waters,” he wrote,
Roger Waters
the Nazis were a genocidal regime that murdered 6 million Jews. That you would have the audacity to compare Jews to monsters who murdered them shows you have no decency, you have no heart, you have no soul. The Jews of Germany did nothing to invite the aggression against them. Indeed, they were loyal citizens of a country that many of them had fought for courageously just 20 years earlier in the First World War. They did not blow up buses for political purposes. They did not send terrorists into schools to murder children. They did not preach that killing German children would get them virgins in heaven. They lived lives of humanity and decency and were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.
You have disgraced yourself by comparing the martyred 6 million, which included 1-and-a-half-million children who were gassed to death in cold blood, to Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas, whose stated intention it is to wipe Israel off the map.
Rabbi Schmuley Boteach
Boteach went on to cite the “endless opportunities” the Palestinians were given “to live with Israel in peace, including the 1936-37 Peel Commission, which partitioned the land into two states, and the U.N. partition plan of 1947, both of which gave the Arabs far more land than the Jews.” But while the Jews agreed to the latter plan, “the Arabs rejected it and instead dedicated themselves to Israel’s destruction.” Boteach also noted the 1967 “war of annihilation against Israel” in which the Jewish state “miraculously defeated four invading Arab armies and conquered huge tracts of land” – and then, to secure a peace treaty, returned the Sinai Peninsula, “three times the size of Israel,” to Egypt, an “act of accommodation,” Boteach underscored, that “has no precedent in the history of the world.”
Yasser Arafat
Boteach continued his history lesson, pointing out that despite Arafat’s “declared intention of armed struggle and destroying the Zionist presence,” and his school bus massacres and other terrorist acts, “Israel never relinquished its hope that Arab leaders who were sincere about peace might arise.” When Israel voluntarily withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Gazans chose to be ruled by Hamas, which, as its charter itself spells out, is “motivated not by Palestinian freedom but by hatred of Jews,”
channeled the billions they received as the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid into rockets rather than hospitals, bombs rather than universities. And they intentionally launch their rockets from nurseries and schools rendering the innocent Palestinian population into human shields, not surprising for an organization that regularly murders Palestinian homosexuals under the false accusation of collaboration and engages in honor killings of young Palestinian women whose only crime is to have a boyfriend.
Yet – as we’ll see tomorrow – it was all lost on Waters.
We’ve been looking at Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN, ex-husband of Jane Fonda, and ardent (if not terribly skillful) apologist for one totalitarian government after another. Last time around we pondered his 2005 comments on North Korea, which can be best summed up in his eloquent remark: “let’s give ’em a break.”
May Day parade in Cuba
On to Castro. Castro has been a good friend of Turner’s, and a big part of his career. Back when Turner started CNN, it mostly restricted its coverage to U.S. news. But in 1981, as Ken Auletta noted in a 2001 New Yorker profile, CNN covered Cuba’s May Day parade and a Castro speech. Castro, a CNN viewer – he picked up the signal from a south Florida station – invited Turner to visit. In 1982, Turner went, and spent four days with the dictator, “smoking cigars, attending a baseball game, duck hunting, visiting schools, discussing politics, and night-clubbing.” Turner told an associate, “Fidel ain’t a Communist. He’s a dictator, just like me.” Castro told Turner that he found CNN “invaluable.” Turner actually persuaded him to tape a CNN promo (which Turner’s colleagues back home managed to talk him out of airing). Fidel “urged Turner to take his news service worldwide,” reported Auletta. The idea excited Turner: “I thought, if Fidel Castro can’t live without it, we ought to be able to sell CNN all over the world.” “Ted came back fired up,” a colleague told Auletta. Within a few months CNN had expanded to Asia; in 1985, it debuted in Europe. All thanks to Fidel Castro, whom Turner reportedly thanked for welcoming him to his “very progessive country.”
Turner with Fidel Castro
Turner later showed an interviewer pictures of his 1982 Cuba trip, while providing a running commentary:
I’m the only man on the planet ever to fly on Cuba’s Air Force One with their president and on America’s Air Force One with our president….People are not all that different – all thi killing and arms race is for nothing. Here’s the great commie dictator we’re so worried about – having a hot toddy….Here’s us hunting….I expected Castro to be a horrible person, but he was a great guy.
In 1997, eager to set up a CNN bureau in Havana, Turner gave Fidel a big thumbs-up in a speech at Harvard. “Castro is one helluva guy!” he exclaimed. “You people would like him! Most people in Cuba like him.” As one reporter noted: “Within weeks CNN was granted its coveted Havana Bureau, the first ever granted by Castro to a foreign network.” In December of that year, Turner and Fonda went to Havana to open the bureau and met with Castro, a move that didn’t exactly please Frank Calzon, head of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C. Calzon’s group, according to one report, had tried “to persuade Turner to donate satellite dishes to Cuba so that Cuban citizens can watch CNN.” Of course, the Castro regime forbade the Cuban people from watching international television.
That wasn’t Turner’s last meeting with Fidel: in 2000, Castro went to New York for a U.N. meeting and spent an entire night with Turner. “The dinner stretched past midnight,” reported Auletta, “and Castro was in the middle of a long-winded story when Turner raised his hand and exclaimed, ‘Fidel, this story is never going to end, is it? I got to go!’ Castro laughed as Turner exited.”
