That would homestly be nice. It's not about Eurovision, but about sending a message. If Russia gets banned from many activities for invading a sovereign country, Israel should get the same treatment for doing what is (at best) the same.
Not trying to start a thing but I don't remember the part of the Russia/Ukraine conflict where a faction of Ukrainian militants committed horrible atrocities against Russian civilians just trying to enjoy life.
The Israel/Russia comparison seems iffy at best...
Yes, I took out the really ignorant thing I said - I apologize for my prior retracted statement.
Funny you should mention that... Did you know that Israel has, on average, killed an equivalent of 9/11 every 10.6 days since October 7th, of which half are children?
Oh, and in terms of numbers, "as bad or worse than 9/11"... if you go by the numbers, it's 766 civilians killed on October 7th vs 2600-3000 on 9/11. So, you're not only off by a factor of 4 there, but you seem clueless how your analogy would look when describing Israels ongoing genocide.
Also, why not just use October 7th as a unit of reference. Israel has done an "October 7th", on average, since then, every 3.2 days. And it's still not a fair comparison, as it's 50% children vs 5%.
Comparing Russia to Israel's scale of war crimes is seriously cutting Israel some undeserved slack, even though it'd be a dumb contest of being the least shitty turd stain on humanity.
Do you think that Russia would have been banned if Ukraine started the invasion by massacring hundreds of innocent civilians at a rave party in Russia, and took random tourists back home to Ukraine to rape them, and then spread videos of it all?
Now, Israel is all but innocent. But it is not 1:1 comparable
You think this started on October 7th? What about the years beforehand of deaths? Do you need someone to bring out the chart again comparing civilian deaths for the last few decades?
Might as well ban Germany alongside too. Our government claimed that the case brought forth by South Africa was "without any basis" the moment the hearing at the ICJ ended. Now that the ICJ has demanded preliminary measures and explicitly stated that the Palestinians are at a plausible risk of genocide, the government tried to spin-doctor it, that "without any basis" would be a normal way of communicating different opinions on a legal case. Oh and on the day of the hearing the German genocide against the Herero and Nama people in todays Namibia had it's 120 years anniversary. The German government did not deem it necessary to adress the fact in any formal way to Namibia or anyone else.
Except for 2018 the last decade was a total embarassement anyways and the spot should be taken by a country whose artists actually make it by ability instead of the spot being paid for.
Germany is one of the biggest humanitarian donators and took many refugees from the region. The foreign ministry refused to call it a Holocaust - which is just on another level. The commitee of the Herero and Nama also critisized the critique on germany as populistic and without legal basis and double standard. The defense of Israel is a state doctrine, also based on history, so it might be a little more complicated than a simple good and bad.
I grew up with the stories about how in Fascist Portugal the "ladies" of the handful of priviledged families who exploited a crushingly poor country were big charitable givers.
Act with cold calous cruelty but all it takes is to give away some crumbs and socially you're lauded as a moral paragon.
Germany is also a major supplier of weapons and military tech to Israel. This includes donating submarines, where the specs are secret, but it is likely submarines capeable of launching nuclear missiles.
Most of the humanitarian infrastructure got destroyed by Israel multiple times and Germany also announced to stop UNRWA funding over the allegations against 10 former UNRWA employees. Nobody demanded them to speak of "Holocaust" in relationship to Gaza, but acknowledging that it is possible that Israel ist intending to commit genocide, is commiting genocide and most definetely has been commiting a great deal of war crimes, is repeatedly rejected by the German government.
The "state doctrine" shows exactly where the problem lies. Germany is using Israel as "proof" of having learned from its past and is happy to commit and help commiting atrocities in the name of Israel. Jews that are critical of Israel are excluded from public discourse, are excluded from arts and culture, have their rights to demonstrations taken away, are accused of antisemitism and in one case also jailed for demonstrating against Israels war on Gaza. So the German government is even commiting many acts of antisemitism while claiming to defend people from antisemitism. Also antisemitism that is rampant in Germanys mainstream society is defendend and pushed under the rug, while trying to paint antisemitism as an issue "imported" through migration from muslim countries.
Here is an articel that goes in depth about it, and provides numerous examples. For instance the former head of the interior intelligence, that is supposed to fight political extremism has been initially defended by the federal anti-antisemitism officer. Meanwhile he was and still is spurting antisemitic conspiracies on twitter.
It is so typical of German governments to pretend that Germany is the worst in the world and to make up for it ends up helping facists. That was basically what happened with Russia with NordStream. It is also very much what seems to happen with Israel today. Obviously the creation of Israel was in a large part Germanys fault due to the Holocaust and Germany has a moral obligation to make up for it. However that should mean no more genocides and not do everything for Israel, including supporting a government, which openly calls for genocide in parts.
Sadly the German elites seem to have learned the "Never again" lesson in a racist way (Jews are like "us", not like "them") rather that humanitarian (nothing like this should ever again be done to anybody anywhere because of their etnicity), hence this continued reaction of unwavering support of Israel against the Palestinians (as in the view of the racist German power elites it's "those like us" vs "them") and the contrasting reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine were the victims were "those like us".
In a humanitarian view both situations are unnacceptable and the one in Gaza is worse because of the intensity, numbers and sheer arbitratrity of civilian killings, but in a racist's eyes the etnicity of the perpetrators and the victims is what shapes the acceptability it not of murder, hence what's going on in Ukraine is unnacceptable for the German government whilst what's going on in Gaza is acceptable.
To my great dissapointment, it seems that whilst Nazism was forced to leave Germany, the rabid racist thinking of it has never left the hearts of the German elites.
It is a bit worse than that. Antisemitism is still strong in German mainstream society. The blind support for Israel is used as "proof" that that isnt the case and now antisemitism is framed as something "imported" through immigration. German anti-antisemitism officers repeatedly criticised jewish people who voiced criticism about Israel or called out antisemitism in German politics. They claimed these jewish people to be "inconsiderate" to the German way of dealing with its history.
Here is an in depth article about the whole ordeal if you are interested:
So you also want to kick out all the Arab states because they're "not European"? The EBU has always included the whole Mediterranean. It has Arab founding members.
But seriously, it’s the gay musical Olympics, what’s not to love? (Unless you’re from Germany/UK in which it’s a point of national pride to dismiss Eurovision, lol?)
No, Germany loves to watch Eurovision, we don't care, that our own country sucks all the time. By now it's more of a meme and people are betting, how bad it's gonna be this year.
They’re not gonna. The broadcaster that represents Israel in Eurovision even shared a song on twitter with children singing “Within a year we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza. Before deleting it fearing it would make them complicit in genocide.
I'm American so I have never followed Eurovision. I always assumed it was European only. Are there many none European countries that participate? The USA doesn't right?
Israel has been since 1973 because their national broadcaster is part of the European Broadcasting Union.
Australia has had a huge cult following and was initially only allowed to join for a one-off year in 2015, but because of the success they've been allowed to take part every year since.
The whole Mediterranean is part of the EBU, at least Lebanon and Morocco are even founding members -- the list isn't easy to read because it lists when a broadcaster joined, not when the country first joined with any broadcaster.
The Arab nations boycott the ESC though because Israel participates. So, please, if you suspend Israel do it early enough so that those states have an opportunity to do a national selection.
The Eurovision Song Contest is organized by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) an organization set up to regulate TV tech. In short they exist to make sure a TV bought in Spain also works in Sweden. As such the EBU also grants full membership to countries that are not part of Europe but have strong economic ties with the continent and therefore are part of the European Broadcasting Area. That's how we got Israel in the contest. Australia also competes because (a) they are an associate member (b) they have an long history of airing the contest even before they competed (c) they spend a large sum of money every year to make the EBU forget where exactly Australia is located.
The US doesn't participate but a couple of years ago NBC bought the rights and tried to mount an "American Song Contest". It didn't work all that well because it was hamstrung by the rigid structure of American network TV. The ESC works (in part) because it is three nights only and they tried to make an entire season of television.
Optics aren't great given how pale and blonde the guy is. And Eurovision is very trivial. But yeah, maybe they should be barred from entering? Are any other participating countries doing anything awful at the moment, I wonder.
I wasn't going to watch it, because of the way the results are biased by the "experts". The difference between the public voting and the jury voting are too different and unfair. I would only watch if they transitioned to viewer voting only.
Eh, the jury voting was brought in because votes tend to always go to neighbouring countries, regardless of how good their act was. It's just an imperfect system placed on top of another.
Maybe times have changed (except for a few like Greece - Cyprus). I feel the public votes are more diverse and true than the jury.
That aside, it is no surprise that culturally, neighboring countries are indeed closer music wise that distant countries. They have different music hits in Portugal than they have in Finland
That’s a lot of Swedish music stars who will not be allowed entry into the US, UK or Germany, where their statements are classified as antisemitism under the IHRA definition. They can still tour Cuba and Venezuela, though.