Pink FloydÂ’s Roger Waters took partial credit for Stevie WonderÂ’s decision to not perform at a Friends of the Israel Defense Forces event.In an interview with pro-Palestinian media outlet Electronic Intifada, Waters said he was one of several celebrities who wrote to Wonder in an effort to dissuade him from playing at the Los Angeles gala in December.
Waters said, “I wrote a letter to him saying that this would be like playing a police ball in Johannesburg the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. It wouldn’t be a great thing to do, particularly as he was meant to be a UN ambassador for peace.”
He said South African leader Bishop Desmund Tutu also sent Wonder a similar message.
Waters compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with apartheid and argued sanctions against Israel were the most “effective way to go.” Waters supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state.
He said, “I think that the kind of boycott that was implemented against the apartheid regime in South Africa back in the day is probably the most effective way to go because the situation is that the Israeli government runs an apartheid regime in Israel, the occupied territories and everywhere else it decides. Let us not forget that they laid waste most of Lebanon around the time I started getting involved in this issue. They destroyed airports, hospitals, any public buildings they could.”
Waters, one of the creative forces behind the rock band Pink Floyd, complained that the US media had intentionally ignored covering his protests against Israel in recent years, speculating it was “under instructions from somewhere not to report these things to the American public, on what grounds I cannot guess.”