The operators of the multi-purpose hall in Frankfurt, Germany canceled the planned concert of the British musician Roger Waters. They did so by pointing out, in their view, the anti-Semitic views of a former member of the band Pink Floyd, who has recently drawn attention to himself by verbally supporting Russia in the war with Ukraine.
How writes server Billboard.com, the 79-year-old singing bassist and critic of Israel was scheduled to perform on May 28 at the Festhalle Frankfurt, where the Nazis in November 1938 during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht they interned several thousand Frankfurt Jews and then deported them from there to concentration camps.
“The reason for canceling the concert is the persistent anti-Israeli stance of the former Pink Floyd frontman, today considered one of the world’s leading anti-Semites,” they announced the shareholders of the hall, which are 60 percent the municipality of Frankfurt and 40 percent the state of Hesse. In their statement, they pointed out that Roger Waters repeatedly calls for a cultural boycott of Israel and compares the regime there with South African apartheid or even Nazi Germany.
The musician is a longtime supporter of the BDS movement, which calls for a boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Already in the years 2010 to 2013 during his concert show discharged into the air a balloon in the shape of a giant pig, on which, in addition to the symbols of multinational corporations, the Jewish Star of David was depicted. Three years ago Waters marked the American government as a “puppet in the hands of the Jew”. Waters rejects accusations of anti-Semitism, he has not yet commented on the cancellation of the concert in Frankfurt. On the other hand, Josef Schuster, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, welcomed the decision. “Anti-Semitism in art and culture must not be tolerated,” Schuster said.
One of the Frankfurt councilors originally requested the cancellation of the concert in connection with Waters’ pro-Russian positions in the current conflict in Ukraine. Because of them, the musician already last September after pressure from local representatives he recalled two planned evenings in Krakow, Poland.
Although Waters calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine illegal, he also claims that it was provoked by the West. In the fall, he wrote an open letter to Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska, in which he accused “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine of bringing the country “into a devastating war.” At the beginning of February, at the request of Moscow, Waters appeared before the UN Security Council.
The former member of Pink Floyd will also visit Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Munich as part of the spring tour called This Is Not A Drill. The shareholders of the Frankfurt hall are now calling on their colleagues to cancel these concerts as well. The former frontman will also visit Prague, where he will perform on May 24 and 25 in the O2 arena. The event is organized by the Czech branch of the Live Nation agency.
From Waters with early May on Twitter she distanced herself Polly Samson, former Pink Floyd lyricist and wife of the band’s guitarist David Gilmour. “Unfortunately, Roger, you are a rotten anti-Semite to the core,” she wrote on Twitter, where she further called him a Putin apologist, a liar, a thief or a tax evader. Waters dismissed it as a false slander and he hintedthat he is considering legal action.
