Former Pink Floyd frontman sparks fury by comparing Israelis to Nazis

Vanessa Thorpe and Edward Helmore in New York

Inflammatory remarks by the musician Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, comparing the modern Israeli state to Nazi Germany have put him at the centre of a furious dispute.

Performers and religious figures reacted angrily to the veteran rock star’s argument that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians can be compared to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. “The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious,” he said in an American online interview last week.

Waters, 70, a well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, has frequently defended himself against accusations that he is antisemitic, claiming he has a right to urge fellow artists to boycott Israel.

This summer he was criticised for using a pig-shaped balloon adorned with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David, as one part of the stage effects at his concerts. Waters countered that it was just one of several religious and political symbols in the show and not an attempt to single out Judaism as an evil force.

Now leading American thinker Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has raised the stakes by describing Waters’ views as audacious and clearly antisemitic.

Writing in the New York Observer, the rabbi said: “Mr Waters, the Nazis were a genocidal regime that murdered six 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 rabbi was responding to Waters’s latest comments on the Middle East. Speaking to the leftwing CounterPunch magazine, the musician criticised the US government for being unduly influenced by the Israeli “propaganda machine”.

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