Pink Floyd lyricist criticizes Roger Waters as anti-Semitic

It’s another brick in a decades-old wall: Musician David Gilmour and wife of author and lyricist Polly Samson have called Gilmour’s former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters anti-Semitic — and more.

The blow comes after Waters on Sunday promoted an interview with a German broadcaster in which he spoke freely, criticizing Israel, defending Russian President Vladimir Putin and slamming Western aid to Ukraine.

Samson, who married Gilmour in 1994 and was the lyricist of some later Pink Floyd songs, put it this way on Monday on social media: “Unfortunately @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to the core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynist, envious, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”

Waters—who tweeted Sunday, “THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE Against the backdrop of the ISRAELI LOBBY’s outrageous and despicable smear campaign to denounce me as an ANTI-SEMITE, which I am not, never have been and never will be” – contradicted Samson’s characterization.

“Roger Waters is aware of the inflammatory and totally inaccurate comments Polly Samson made about him on Twitter, which he completely refutes. He is currently taking advice on his position,” his account tweeted Monday afternoon.

Water’s Sunday tweet linked to a translated version of an interview published by Germany’s Berliner Zeitung over the weekend, in which the musician spoke at length about geopolitics.

Here are a few quotes from the interview:

“I listen more openly now [to] what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I hear, he rules carefully and makes decisions based on consensus in the government of the Russian Federation. In Russia, too, there are critical intellectuals who have been arguing against American imperialism since the 1950s. And a central sentence was always: Ukraine is a red line. A neutral buffer state must remain. If it doesn’t stay that way, we don’t know where it will lead. We still don’t know, but it could end in a third world war.”

“I think if the US can convince its own citizens and you and many other people that Russia is the real enemy and that Putin is the new Hitler, they will have an easier time stealing from the poor to give to the rich to give and also to start and encourage more wars, like this proxy war in Ukraine.”

“What everyone in the West is being told is the ‘unprovoked invasion’ narrative. huh? Anyone with half a brain can see that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked beyond measure. It’s probably the most provoked invasion of all time.”

“The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Britain, by the way, during our colonial days. The British, for example, committed genocide against the native peoples of North America… We believed that we were inherently superior to the native peoples, just as the Israelis do in Palestine. Well, we weren’t, and neither are the Israeli Jews.”

Waters has also sided with China on Taiwan and the repression of the Uyghurs.

Less than an hour after Roger’s reply on Monday, Gilmour supported his wife and tweeted“Every word provably true.”

The feud between Waters and Gilmour has lasted since the first left Pink Floyd in the mid-1980s and then sued to try and have the band’s name retired. This court dispute was settled after a few years, but the men continued to bicker, albeit with brief moments of reconciliation along the way.

In September 2022, while Rogers was planning his This Is Not a Drill tour, the city of Warsaw, Poland, canceled two shows scheduled for April at a city venue after the “Dark Side of the Moon” musician wrote one had an open letter to the First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska. In it, Waters accused “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine of “putting your country on the path to this catastrophic war.”

“He doesn’t see the truth. He doesn’t understand what’s going on in Ukraine,” Warsaw City Councilor Lukasz Wantuch, who has been on dozens of humanitarian missions in Ukraine since the war began, told the Associated Press. Wantuch urged Rogers to join him on a trip to see the devastation caused by Russian attacks, saying the musician could book shows at a private venue instead.

Waters, writing on Facebook, attributed the canceled shows and Wantuch’s “draconian censorship” of his work to his “public efforts to encourage all those involved in the catastrophic war in Ukraine, particularly the US and Russian governments, to work towards a negotiated peace instead of escalating things towards a bitter end that could be nuclear war and the end of all life on this planet.”

The This Is Not a Drill tour kicks off in Lisbon, Portugal on March 17th and concludes in Manchester, England on June 10th. Poland remains off the calendar.