Amnesty International was blasted on Wednesday by Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center for selecting “anti-Semite” Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd bassist and a leader in efforts to culturally boycott Israel, to present it’s top humanitarian Ambassador of Conscience award.
“Once again, Amnesty International is signaling that its fight for human rights apparently does not extend to anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.
A Jewish group in Duesseldorf is urging a boycott of the rocker’s upcoming show, which routinely features an inflatable pig with a Star of David on its side.
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Michael Szentei-Heise said in a statement Thursday that Waters was an “intellectual arsonist” whose stage act used “anti-Semitic and National Socialist” imagery.
“If I were a musician looking to protest human rights abuses today, I would be looking at Syria, at Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, everywhere but Israel,” Rabbi Cooper said. “The fact that Roger Waters would call for a boycott against Israel, when Israelis and Palestinians are actually meeting today, shows a complete disconnect from reality, and probably really just a disinterest in even the headlines of today’s newspaper, and certainly, a fundamental bias; I guess you could call it a hatred.”
“You can dress it up anyway you want, but how can Waters come down on the side of BDS, when the two sides are sitting down in negotiations, which was allegedly the original reason for creating this movement, and doing so given that the entire neighborhood of the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, is boiling over in bloodshed?” Rabbi Cooper asked.