Roger Waters is a founding member of the British rock band Pink Floyd, and by John Kiriakou’s reckoning a member of one of the four or five biggest-selling musical acts in the history of the planet. Kiriakou introduces him as “a personal hero of mine” and as a man who has used his fame, his notoriety and his money to support human rights, civil rights and civil liberties — being “especially concerned about the people of Gaza” — and closes their interviews by calling him “one of the clearest voices in the world in defense of human rights.”[1][2][3]
The second mortgage
Kiriakou identifies Waters as the anonymous benefactor who paid off his second mortgage during his 2013–2015 federal prison sentence, sparing his wife and children the loss of the family home. The act was unattributed at the time — “Like magic, we get this letter from the bank saying somebody had paid off our second mortgage” — and Kiriakou identified Waters as the source only years later.[4][5]
Kiriakou: “He anonymously paid off my second mortgage when I went to prison. Anonymously. It was years before I found out that Roger did it. … I had never met the man, but he followed my case, thought I did the right thing, and put his money where his mouth was.”[4][5] In a separate telling, Kiriakou puts a number on the delay: it was seven years before he learned it was Waters who had done it.[6] The two have since become personal friends, and Waters is a recurring guest on Kiriakou’s programme, where Kiriakou tells him that “there’s a huge swath of the public here in the United States where you have saintly status, including in my house.”[7]
Advocacy on Palestine
Waters’ position, as he puts it to Kiriakou, is deliberately narrow: “my platform’s tiny. It’s just the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Either you believe in it or you don’t.” He dates that platform to the declaration adopted by the United Nations in Paris in December 1948 and lists its content as a right to life first — “nobody should ever be allowed to kill even one of us” — followed by food, shelter, education and medical care.[8][9][10]
Asked by Kiriakou whether third countries could force food into Gaza, Waters said they could if they considered it part of their mandate, and described the gap between what Western democracies profess and what they do as “a real awakening” — he had grown up believing that the postwar settlement had permanently ruled out both genocide and the abandonment of basic human rights, and “now I know it’s not.”[11][12] On the framing of the war as a response to October 7, he called the attack “an absolute side issue” and the surrounding history not complicated at all, tracing it to the Nakba of 1948 and to the second sentence of the Balfour Declaration, which conditioned a Jewish homeland on the rights of Palestine’s existing population.[13][14][15]
Kiriakou has also recalled, from a Washington event at which both men spoke, Waters’ account of approaching entertainers who had been active and effective in the anti-apartheid movement and finding that they would not take up Palestine. Their reason was consistent and, Kiriakou remembers, always the same word: the issue was “complicated.” Asked three years later whether that had changed, Waters said it had not.[16][17]
Naming the dead from the stage
On his 2022–2023 tour Waters recited names during the song The Powers That Be: Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist killed on the outskirts of Jenin; an American protester crushed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home; and Anne Frank. He describes the passage as “a list of martyrs,” and says it was the juxtaposition of those names that “drove them crazy” and prompted attempts to have the tour cancelled.[18][19][20]
He read Kiriakou the opening of an unreleased song built on the same idea, Sumud — named for the Arabic word he glosses as “steadfast perseverance, particularly in resistance to the occupation of your homeland.” Its argument, he said, is that nothing will be changed by heads of government but “in the end by billions of ordinary people” singing together: “ordinary people just standing their ground … together they will turn this ship around.”[21][22][23][24]
Cancellation, boycott, and pressure
Kiriakou asked Waters directly what he encounters as he travels. Waters answered that promoters and governments “try and cancel the shows and they use lawfare, warfare, anything they can.” In Germany he is, in his own word, “verboten” — no newspaper will speak to him, with a single slanted exception he could name.[25][26] In South America in late 2023 the pressure took a different form: he could not get a hotel room in Buenos Aires, borrowed an apartment instead, and left immediately after his second concert — in a city where he had previously played nine consecutive sold-out shows at the River Plate stadium to 65,000 people a night.[27][28][29]
Waters also described a direct approach: a telephone call from a wealthy American acquaintance who handed him over to an Israeli official, who tried to persuade him that speaking out against Israel was a terrible mistake. It was one of several attempts, he said, “to try and deviate” him from his path.[30][31] Kiriakou characterises the accusations of antisemitism made against him as “specious.”[32]