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Notes -
The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.
I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.
Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)
I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.
I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.
Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.
*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.
Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born? That's hilarious.
On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is). What did the Jews ever done to them? I have always been a fan of Irish and wider Celtic culture, but this thing makes me sad.
In the 2020s, the "far-right" are people who think it's bad to massacre Jews for the crime of being Jewish, and who think Jews are entitled to defend themselves against attempts to massacre them. Whereas the "anti-racist left" are the people making excuses for people who want to massacre Jews, insisting that the reasons they want to do so are perfectly legitimate and not at all related to blind ethnic hatred, suggesting that it's the Jews' own fault if people want to murder them, and saying that the Jews are in the wrong if they attempt to defend themselves against attempts to murder them.
I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it.
A year ago I would have disagreed with you, but at this point I'm struggling to think of alternative explanations which could explain this degree of ire. Conspiratorial ranting about how Mossad are buying up Irish SIMs en masse in order to manipulate Eurovision voting for hasbara purposes - I mean, come on. Don't tell me this has anything to do with "anti-colonialism".
That said, if it's Reddit we're talking about, it's kind of self-selected for the worst excesses of woke, so maybe overall picture is not that bad. No idea, I am still holding some stupid hope that they'd wake up one day and figure out this is all BS. Probably won't happen though.
Reddit is certainly crazier, but among my university educated friends it's not rare at all to claim that the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted and besides, it's exaggerated anyway. I usually don't prod further, but when I confronted a friend who is unusually tolerant of different opinions with well, imagine yourself to be an Israeli: What if you're wrong? What if you let them in, and the murderous hatred does not immediately vanish? He just retreated to the motte that Israels' behaviour is immoral either way. At least I could get him to agree that maybe a slower process that doesn't have catastrophical fail states is better.
That had already been proven wrong, it's not a theoretical question, Israel gave up all power in Gaza and actively tried to not intervene there as much as possible for 20 years. What we have now is the outcome of that policy. Israel has its own left, and it operated exactly based on that concept - in fact, it was the dominating concept over the majority of the establishment, however they color themselves on other issues - that the hate will recede once Israel administration is gone, and the residual hard core of haters is going to be easy to contain since it would be small and isolated. That went catastrophically wrong of course.
It's like somebody would say "if we only had a socialist country" ignoring the USSR ever existed. Which I guess what the left is routinely doing, so not much new here.
I agree - but to them, the situation in Gaza was sufficiently bad that it doesn't count. It's just a fairly simplistic moralistic view that doesn't really account for agency on the alleged victims side or pragmatic solutions.
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