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Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has struck out against both McGill University and Canadian megadonor Sylvan Adams after the latter spoke publicly of his plans to organize a Pink Floyd concert near the site of the Nova music festival massacre in Israel.
Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985, and his extreme political stances have often put him at odds with his surviving former bandmates Nick Mason and David Gilmour.
When Waters said that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine, for instance, Mason and Gilmour briefly reformed Pink Floyd just long enough to release Hey, Hey, Rise Up, a pro-Ukraine anthem whose proceeds benefited the Ukraine Humanitarian Relief Fund.
In an interview last month with the Canadian Jewish News, Adams said he had been in talks to organize a similar Pink Floyd reunion at Kibbutz Re’im, the closest Israeli community to the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 300 were murdered on October 7.
“Roger Waters was kicked out of Pink Floyd — he’s a nutball, Roger Waters — and they can’t stand each other,” said Adams, a Quebec City-born billionaire who immigrated to Israel in 2015.
He added that Waters’ stances are “completely repugnant to the two remaining guys.”
Waters has been vocally anti-Israel for decades, often comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, and claiming that the world is in the grip of a powerful “Jewish lobby.”
Just a month after the October 7 massacres, Waters said they were justified and that widespread accounts of mass rapes and other atrocities were just Israelis “making up stories.”
“Was it justified for them to resist the occupation? Yeah. They’re absolutely legally and morally bound to resist the occupation since 1967,” he told interviewer Glenn Greenwald.
Shortly after Adams revealed his plan for a Pink Floyd reunion in Israel, Waters responded with an op-ed in the leftist publication Rabble.ca.
Waters called Adams a “looney Zionist billionaire” attempting to use Pink Floyd “to promote and celebrate the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
“I wish him the worst possible luck in the world in his attempts to suborn the name Pink Floyd, a name I am proud to have helped create, to celebrate the obscene horrors that the state he is so proud to represent has wreaked upon this our hapless world,” he wrote.
Waters also pledged himself to support anti-Israel student activists on the McGill University campus, where Adams is a major donor.
In 2022, Adams announced a $29 million gift to the Montreal university to build the Sylvan Adams Sport Science Institute.
The reason Adams had been speaking to Canadian Jewish News in the first place was because anti-Israel demonstrators had attacked the under-construction institute to celebrate the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks.
After hanging banners on the building reading “no Zionism” and “f--k Sylvan,” large crowds of masked students in keffiyehs then broke windows and graffitied the site with the upside-down red triangle — a Hamas symbol used to mark Israeli targets.
It was only the latest in a series of extreme anti-Israel incidents to hit the iconic Canadian university in the last 13 months. For months, the campus was host to an anti-Israel encampment hung with signs glorifying “intifada” and even advertising a youth summer camp with images of children carrying Kalashnikov rifles.
“I was utterly appalled by what took place on the front lawn of McGill University,” Adams told the Canadian Jewish News, adding that he was attempting to use his influence with McGill President Deep Saini to counter campus extremism.
“Deep and I, we agree on everything — absolutely everything — he sees the problem, he sees the antisemitism, he sees the absolutely unacceptable behaviour. Behaviour that, if this were a group of anti-LGBTQ or anti-Black — or any other minority group — they would have lasted three and a half seconds,” said Adams.
In his Rabble.ca op-ed, Waters called this “authoritarian pressure” and said “the administration and Zionist donors are repressing student protesters.”
“Isn’t it time you put your students’ heartfelt defense of human rights and just demands for their brothers and sisters in Palestine, above the unjust demands of a genocidal sectarian donor class?” Waters wrote in a letter to Saini.
Waters is also scheduled to participate in an online rally on Thursday, Students Over Donor Money, organized via Just Peace Advocates, a Canadian anti-Israel group that has long called for sanctions against any institution with even peripheral links to Zionism. As recently as 2022, they were signatories on a statement of solidarity with Samidoun, the Vancouver anti-Israel non-profit which the government of Canada listed as a terrorist entity in September.
On Sunday, Adams responded to the campaign with a Canadian Jewish News op-ed in which he cited a 2023 tweet from David Gilmour agreeing with novelist Polly Samson’s assertion that Waters is antisemitic to his “rotten core,” and also “a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”
“Every word demonstrably true,” wrote Gilmour.
Adams then reiterated his plans for a Pink Floyd reunion at Kibbutz Re’im, saying “it would be a powerful message heard around the world.”
“But also something to spite you, dear Roger,” he added.
