Founder of the 1960s British band Pink Floyd and vehement BDS promoter Roger Waters is now in the business of echoing Russian propaganda claims that the Syrian regime did not attack its own people with chemical weapons a wee ago, and that the group that first reported the news, White Helmets, had actually staged the attack to seduce the West into attacking President Assad.
Waters made his accusation during a concert in Barcelona on Saturday night, after first telling the crowd that a supporter of the White helmets had asked to speak to them about the deadly chemical attack.
“The White Helmets are a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists,” Waters asserted. “If we would listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others we would be encouraged to encourage our governments to go and start dropping bombs on people in Syria,” he reasoned.
“This would be a mistake of monumental proportions,” Waters declared, adding, “What we should do is be persuading our governments to not to go and drop bombs on people.”
Waters made his bizarre comments one day after the US, the UK, and France had struck Syrian chemical facilities in retaliation of the regime’s use of chemical weapons against the town of Douma near Damascus.
The White Helmets, a volunteer group that operates in rebel-controlled Syria and in Turkey, offers urban search and rescue in response to bombing, medical evacuation, evacuation of civilians from danger areas, and essential service delivery. 159 White Helmets have been killed in action to date.
The organization has been the target of a disinformation campaign by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian and Russia-sponsored media organizations such as Russia Today (RT) and Iranian news agency MNA, with unproven claims of close ties with terrorist activities.
In October 2016, Waters lost $4 million in sponsorship after American Express refused to fund Waters’ North America tour due to his anti-Israel rhetoric. In November 2016, Citibank joined American Express in cutting ties to Waters. The ADL’s National Director Abraham H. Foxman accused Waters of anti-Semitism, as did Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.