Radiohead’s Thom Yorke showed anti-Israel protesters what he really thought of them.
The lead singer of the popular British rock group Radiohead, which is slated to perform in Israel next week, raised his middle finger at anti-Israel protesters who were disrupting the band’s Glasgow concert on Friday, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which seeks to isolate Israel until it accedes to a number of unilateral Palestinian demands, have long tried to force Radiohead to cancel its upcoming concert in Tel Aviv. Before performing the song “Myxomatosis,” Thom Yorke saw Palestinian flags and a sign reading “Radiohead: #canceltelaviv,” and reportedly exclaimed, “Some [expletive] people!”
At one point during the concert he flashed his middle finger at the disruptive protesters.
The band faced similar protests at a recent concert in Glastonbury.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine last month, Yorke slammed efforts to pressure his band to cancel their Tel Aviv performance, calling them “offensive” and “patronizing.”
“All these people to stand there at a distance throwing stuff at us, waving flags, saying, ‘You don’t know anything about it!’ Imagine how offensive that is for Jonny,” he observed in reference to bandmate Jonny Greenwood, who “has both Palestinian and Israeli friends and a wife who’s an Arab Jew.”
“And imagine how upsetting that it’s been to have this out there. Just to assume that we know nothing about this. Just to throw the word ‘apartheid’ around and think that’s enough.”
“But at the same time, if you want me to be honest, yeah, it’s really upsetting that artists I respect think we are not capable of making a moral decision ourselves after all these years,” Yorke added in an apparent reference to Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters, who supports the BDS campaign. “They talk down to us and I just find it mind-boggling that they think they have the right to do that. It’s extraordinary.
J. Burnel, bassist for the influential punk band The Stranglers, criticized Waters last November for his efforts to isolate Israel, saying, “I think he’s pretty ignorant, he doesn’t know the situation.”
After calling the political reality in Israel “complicated,” Burnel elaborated, “If my neighbors told me that they would kick me out, back into the sea, I would kind of get quite defensive.”
Radiohead’s concert will be the latest by a major recording act to perform in Israel this summer. Rod Stewart, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Aerosmith all performed in Tel Aviv in recent weeks.
By: The Tower
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