To cleanse the palate, via Ace, no headline with “Eddie Vedder” and “Palestine” in it can lead to something good, can it?

Skip to 4:00 or so for the key bit. (He drops an F-bomb or two, so here’s your NSFW warning.) Right now, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Mike McCready are drawing straws to see who has to tell Eddie that Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly 10 years ago.

Although he never explicitly mentions Israel by name, Vedder denounces “those who go across borders and take over land that doesn’t belong to them.”

“I swear to f—ing god, there are people out there who are looking for a reason to kill,” the famed American rocker said. “They’re looking for a reason to go across borders and take over land that doesn’t belong to them. They should get the f—out, and mind their own f—ing business.”

“We don’t want to give them our money. We don’t want to give them our taxes to drop bombs on children.”

It was this point that Vedder began belting out lyrics from Edwin Starr’s pacifist anthem, “War.”

I’m going to protest by traveling back in time to when I last listened to Pearl Jam and warn my 17-year-old self to boycott. What transforms this from being merely irritating to egregious isn’t the sentiment; it’s embarrassing but not surprising that Mumbles here thinks Israel, rather than Hamas, is looking for a reason to kill and “take over land.” What makes this egregious is that this guy has the entire rock canon at his fingertips and a world-class band to back him up, and the most imaginative song he can conjure up to electrify the moment is the most famously bombastic anti-war anthem of the Vietnam era. It’d be like asking a modern folk singer to sing something about peace and having him turn instantly to “Imagine.” Your musical repertoire, even at moments of searing emotion, consists only of songs that everyone in the world knows and regards as hopelessly played out?

I guess it could have been worse. They could have played “Us and Them.” *Shudder* Exit quotation:

Hoo boy. No, I will not sympathize with the Palestinians simply because they're worse at killing people than they want to be.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) July 14, 2014