Roger Waters is A Fool; Rashad Bayoumi Isn't; Obama?

Roger Waters of the Pink Floyd band has announced his support of BDS, although not until a few years after doing a large concert in Israel which probably generated a spot of income, so the practical aspect of boycotting dosen't mean much. In this article he explains his decision.

I don't much follow such matters, but I expect Waters is a talented musician. His grasp on the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict is very shaky; here's a man who can be fed contradictory lies and swallows them all unthinkingly. I was especially impressed by the fact that he returns again and again to the wall Israel has built (well, that would make sense, given Water's history of walls), without ever reflecting on the fact that the wall is actually an expression of ending the occupation: the sense of having a border is that the Palestinians will end up on one side, and the Israelis on the other, and there will be a border separating them. The wall, and partition, also contradict the right of return he supports, but no matter. The important thing is that a man with no grasp of the reality feels it's an honorable thing to make idiotic and counter-factual statements about the Jewish state, and he'll be applauded for doing so by large numbers of other malicious fools. That's the important heart of the matter.

Rashad Bayoumi isn't a fool. He's a hard-core antisemite, of the boilerplate opinion that Jews rule America and America wishes to destroy Islam, and Israel is the tool they use to attack the Muslim world from its geographic center. He's also a top fellow in the Muslim brotherhood. Just like everyone else, I don't know how influential he and his evil comrades will be in the new Arab world that will rise from the present turmoil, but it certainly needs careful monitoring at the least, and lots of careful planing: what if he turns out to be very influential? What then? Here, for starters, is a translated interview with him from last week. Listen, and shudder.


In a recent meeting between President Obama and a bunch of prominent American Jews, reports on which are conflicting because it was off the record and no official transcript has been produced, Obama seems to have

reportedly urged Jewish communal leaders to speak to their friends and colleagues in Israel and to “search your souls” over Israel's seriousness about making peace.

Furthermore, some (but perhaps not all) participants felt Obama was singling out Israel:

[T]he president also implied that Israel bears primary responsibility for advancing the peace process. They interpreted the president’s comments either as hostile, naive or unsurprising. Obama said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is eager to secure his legacy by establishing a Palestinian state and would accept a decent offer if one were on the table, according to participants. “The Palestinians don't feel confident that the Netanyahu government is serious about territorial concessions,” the president reportedly said.

I wasn't there, and don't know exactly what he said. The idea, however, that the American president thinks Israelis need to be lectured at by him or by American Jews about the threats that face them is, to my mind, extremely distasteful. The idea that the Palestinians will accept any offer the Israelis can viably make so as to end up with a small state on a fragment of the territory they feel they deserve has, alas, been repeatedly tested and has repeatedly led to disaster. Disaster in which Israelis (and Palestinians) pay a price in blood. No-one needs to expect a faraway musician to know about this, or to care; the American president, however, ought to.