Thom Yorke Breaks Silence on Israel Controversy

I'm glad he's done this and basically has told everyone to F off. Good for him and good for Radiohead for not giving into SJW demands.

Rolling Stone Article

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It's well over a month until Radiohead wrap up their 2017 A Moon Shaped Pool Tour at Park Hayarkon in Tel Aviv, Israel on July 19th, but it's already shaping up to be the most controversial show of their career. They've performed in Israel eight times – most recently in the summer of 2000 – but this is the first time they've visited the country since the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement began in 2005.

The movement calls for a complete cultural boycott of Israel until Palestinians are granted the "right of return" and Israel's West Bank barrier is dismantled. It has caused everyone from Elvis Costello to Devendra Banhart to Gorillaz to cancel planned concerts in the country, though many others have ignored it.

On April 23rd, over 50 prominent figures, including Roger Waters, Desmond Tutu, Thurston Moore and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, signed a petition urging Radiohead to cancel the show.

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I'll be totally honest with you: this has been extremely upsetting. There's an awful lot of people who don't agree with the BDS movement, including us. I don't agree with the cultural ban at all, along with J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and a long list of others. There are people I admire [who have been critical of the concert] like [English film director] Ken Loach, who I would never dream of telling where to work or what to do or think. The kind of dialogue that they want to engage in is one that's black or white. I have a problem with that. It's deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw shite at us in public. It's deeply disrespectful to assume that we're either being misinformed or that we're so retarded we can't make these decisions ourselves. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme. It's offensive and I just can't understand why going to play a rock show or going to lecture at a university [is a problem to them].

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The university thing is more of a head frick for me. It's like, really? You can't go talk to other people who want to learn stuff in another country? Really? The one place where you need to be free to express everything you possibly can. You want to tell these people you can't do that? And you think that's gonna help? The person who knows most about these things is [Radiohead guitarist] Jonny [Greenwood]. He has both Palestinian and Israeli friends and a wife who's an Arab Jew. 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. 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. It's fricking weird. It's such an extraordinary waste of energy. Energy that could be used in a more positive way.

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