Waters told his cheering audience, "If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings."
Days after the concert, Waters shared a series of emails he'd received from The Syria Campaign, a public relations firm representing the White Helmets, which was trying to bring Waters into the fold to help "elevate the voices of Syria's peaceful heroes."
Waters didn't respond to the emails, instead opting to do a little research on the organization. He later shared the messages with journalist Max Blumenthal, who published them on the Grayzone Project with Waters' permission.
Speaking to Radio Sputnik's By Any Means Necessary, Blumenthal suggested that the reveal shows "how alternative media can make a major international impact," since few journalists have written critically about the White Helmets over the years.
"Now, here's one of the premier survivors of the golden age of rock… talking about the White Helmets on stage," Blumenthal told show hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon. "He basically declared that the White Helmets are, in so many words, this international propaganda organization which is not what it says it is… that they're agitating for war and that they are working hand-in-glove with jihadist groups in Syria."
"What Roger had done was lift the mask on the premier influence operation driving the dirty war on Syria, because it was the White Helmets that the US, that Washington, relied on as its only source of intelligence on the Syrian chemical attacks," Blumenthal stressed. He explained that "the White Helmets shoot videos of people who are supposedly injured or wounded or dying from chemical attacks and propagate them on their social media channels and then the world reacts."
Blumenthal noted that after meeting with Waters, the 74-year-old bassist handed him the emails to "show just how sort of cynical the organization was."
"I think they just assumed Roger was a dupe… they'd won over other celebrities like Coldplay, which if you compare their music to Roger's… there's no comparison," the journalist remarked. "So many A-listers were recruited by The Syria Campaign, but Roger started asking questions when he received the email."
"For someone like Roger to… go up there and make this statement, it really legitimized all of us [who'd been reporting on the White Helmets], but it also really showed that this is a real organic concern that citizens around the world have, that we're being driven to war by a fake humanitarian psyops," Blumenthal said. "And that this isn't some kind of Kremlin-directed propaganda campaign, which is what The Syria Campaign is trying to dismiss it as."
"Roger spoke for a lot of people, I think, when he delivered that message," Blumenthal said.