Consider his offstage politics to grasp what Waters is trying to accomplish artistically fully. His activism is devoted primarily to pressuring other performers to join the BDS movement to boycott Israel. The musician attributed his relative failure to persuade others to, among other things, the “extraordinary powerful” Jewish lobby. That power somehow failed to prevent the hippy celebrity from scoring interviews in major publications and high-profile public appearances during which he spews blood libels and world domination theories.

Waters is secure in the belief that a Jewish “cabal” runs the world. Conservative Jewish donor Sheldon Anderson, for instance, is a “fascist” “puppet master” who is “filling the coffers and pulling all the strings.” In the UK, the rock-n-roller believes the “Israel lobby” cost Jeremy Corbyn the election. …

The musician’s defenders make two points. First, some publications apparently misreported that the pig at the Berlin concert had a Star of David on it — examples of the ex-Pink Floyd’s antisemitism are aplenty, and it’s easy to get lost in them. Waters uses a new pig for each concert, and the one in Berlin, according to Potter, had the logo of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. That Jews are responsible for all wars in the world is a standard antisemitic trope.

The second line of defense is that Waters is merely enacting the part of a fascist from his movie The Wall, and that the movie provides important context for his concerts. As well-meaning as this explanation may sometimes be, it gets the performer backward. The Wall doesn’t put his allegedly lip-syncing shows in context. Roger Waters’s antisemitism is the context for The Wall. He play-acts as a fascist dictator because he is obsessed with the phantom Jewish menace — and the dead Jewish girl named Ann Frank.