Opinion

A new Zionist song and dance

May 24, 2018

The Eurovision song contest is normally a harmless joke, which since the European Broadcasting Union began it in 1956 has built up worldwide television audiences claimed to number up to 600 million.

The songs are generally dreadful, though in 1974, the winning Swedish group ABBA thereafter enjoyed an outstanding international career. The jury is renowned for the partiality of its voting, generally backing their own country’s entry while sometimes giving “nul points” to political rivals, even when the songs are not entirely awful.

The normal rule is that the winning country will host the next contest. It is said that many national broadcasters are so embarrassed by the event that they go out of their way to avoid having the winner.

Nevertheless, in terms of sheer entertainment, “Eurovision,” as it is generally known, is clearly extremely popular, even if many viewers tune in to laugh at the silliness of the spectacle.

Some 40 countries are now eligible to take part including Australia and Israel. And this year Israel won with an entry by the eccentric singer Netta Barzilai. Hailed as a song about “female empowerment,” it nevertheless involved a lot of chicken noises and flapping of elbows. As such it was open to mockery, which is precisely what a satirical Dutch TV show did on Saturday. And it was inevitable that the song’s lyrics were changed to mention the building of a wall in the West Bank that US President Trump “could only dream of” and the killing by Israeli snipers of 60 Palestinians during the recent Gaza protests. Footage of these murders and the opening of the US embassy was projected behind the singer Martine Sandifort.

Highly predictably, the Israeli embassy in the Netherlands has complained and Dutch Zionists have begun the usual campaign of protest. The ambassador Aviv Shir-On said the program was crude and offensive and the lyrics’ references to money packaged “anti-Semitic stereotypes as jokes”.

What the hardline Zionists do not seem to appreciate is that their endless recourse to characterizing the slightest criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitic” is both lame and counterproductive. The world watched while over 2,000 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli troops and it was outraged. Many, but unfortunately not enough, Israelis were themselves repulsed by this slaughter. What happened on the Gaza border was a tragedy not just for the Palestinians but also for Israel. A truly humane and civilized country would recognize it as such and express genuine regret, mount a real investigation, identify and punish the murderers and take steps to ensure that such carnage could never happen again. But the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of doing any such thing. A few crocodile tears, and it is back to murder as usual.

Around the world millions of people who do not have an anti-Semitic bone in their body are disgusted at the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians. In the dark corners of European democracies, there now lurk increasingly mainstream politicians ready to kindle greater anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. European Muslim leaders seek to reach out to their fellow Europeans and roundly condemn acts of terror perpetrated by Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS). European Zionists take the completely opposite approach, choosing instead to wave the banner of anti-Semitism, which with every new enormity in Israel is becoming increasingly threadbare.


May 24, 2018
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