At a Roger Waters concert on Sunday in Frankfurt, a protester carrying an Israeli flag charged the stage.
At the conclusion of a song performed by the former Pink Floyd bassist, audience members at the Festhalle arena can be seen in a video shared on social media getting up and waving enormous Israeli flags. “Am Yisrael Chai” (“the people of Israel live”) is chanted as one of the protesters carrying an Israeli flag gets past security and makes it to the stage’s upper level, where the musicians were sitting.
After appearing at a concert there on May 17 while dressed in a Nazi uniform, Waters is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Berlin police.
The anti-Israel activist also compared the accidental death of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in a gunfight with terrorists in Jenin in May 2022 to Anne Frank’s death in the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen prison camp in 1945.
The concert was held at the Festhalle, where more than 3,000 Jews were apprehended during the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 before being taken to Nazi concentration camps, despite attempts by Frankfurt officials to stop it.
Waters successfully challenged this decision in court.
Before the evening concert, a memorial and protest featuring Jewish organizations, politicians, and civil society organizations were organized.
The names of the 600 Jews who were detained at the Festhalle during Kristallnacht were read out by the protesters.
Before the concert, Uwe Becker, a former mayor of Frankfurt and the state of Hesse’s representative for Jewish life and the battle against antisemitism, claimed that Waters was “spreading antisemitism” by drawing parallels between Frank’s passing and that of Abu Akleh.
He added that the court ruled that an artist’s concert is protected by freedom of expression and the arts, despite the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hesse, where Frankfurt is located, attempting to prevent it.
“I believe that there is so much antisemitism, antisemitism related to Israel, that this should not happen,” Becker stated.
“Antisemitism in this really violent form of depressing and taking away the legitimacy of the State of Israel, associating Israel with the crimes of the Shoah, Becker stated that “putting all those things together relativizes the Shoah crime in a way that I think it should be under review to see if there are any crimes happening while he is performing.”
Even if it is not completely set in our rules and laws, what we see here is awful. In my opinion, antisemitism is not art; it is a crime.
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