Radiohead Strikes Back at Critics of Israel Concert: ‘Offensive’

JTA reports:  After dozens of high-profile artists signed a letter in February urging Radiohead to cancel their upcoming concert in Tel Aviv, some might have assumed that the band would not respond to the criticism. After all, the British band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, rarely gives interviews, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a particularly fraught issue to comment upon.

But oh, has Yorke responded.

In an interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene published on Friday, Yorke fired back at his critics for assuming that the members of Radiohead are uninformed on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He argued that the authors of the letter — which rehashes the principle ideas driving the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which aims to to exert economic and political pressure on Israel due to its policies toward Palestinians — waste their energy by throwing the word “apartheid” around.

Read the full story.