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Howard Stern Goes Off About Roger Waters’ BDS Support

‘Where do you want the Jews to go, Roger? You want them to just go back to the concentration camp?’

by
Jonathan Zalman
October 08, 2015
Erika Goldring/Getty Images
Howard Stern attends the 'America's Got Talent' New Orleans auditions as a judge at UNO Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, Louisiana, March 4, 2013. Erika Goldring/Getty Images
Erika Goldring/Getty Images
Howard Stern attends the 'America's Got Talent' New Orleans auditions as a judge at UNO Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, Louisiana, March 4, 2013. Erika Goldring/Getty Images

On October 2, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters published a last-ditch open letter to Bon Jovi, urging the band to cancel their performance the following day in Tel Aviv, to “not to give succor to the Israeli government’s apartheid policies.” (The band’s lead singer, Jon Bon Jovi, was apparently amped to play there.) In the letter, Waters, a fervent supporter of the BDS movement (who has written open letters before) listed 15 atrocities that the band would be standing “shoulder to shoulder” with, were they to follow through with their scheduled performance in Israel. They did.

On Tuesday, shock jock Howard Stern reportedly went off on Waters during his radio show during a seven-minute rant in which he asked, “What is it with Roger Waters and the Jews?” (It appears that audio of Stern’s rant, as luck and copyright law would have it, has all but been taken down across the Internet.) Reported Slate, Stern, in effect, argued that Waters’ stance on Israel and support for the BDS movement were hypocritical because Waters continues to live in the U.S., “a country that was founded on white people coming in and obliterating the native population?”

“How does he stand it?” asked Stern. “Why don’t we all just leave?”

Stern, who is Jewish, continued:

“Where do you want the Jews to go, Roger? You want them to just go back to the concentration camp? What is it you want, fuckhead?”
“Where’s the one place they can stick Jews where no one will be offended? Because the Jews are getting killed all over the world. Give them a little homeland on a desert where there’s no water, where essentially no one could live. And no one did live there despite the bullshit. And the Palestinians are these Arabs that could live in Egypt, that could live in Saudi Arabia, but guess what? Those countries don’t want them either. So they have a country, and Israel has a tiny little country and it bugs the shit out of Roger Waters.”

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.