A night of shame for the Bunker BBC and the Bunker European Broadcasting Union

I'm a lifelong Eurovision fan - I've only missed one contest since I was five years old, but never before has it been quite such an uncomfortable watch.  The European Broadcasting Union should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, as should many of the individual national broadcasters, most notably the BBC and the German public broadcaster NDR.  Countless viewers told the EBU that they needed to learn from the catastrophic mistake of last year, when not only was Israel allowed to compete but received special protection with the use of audio technology to filter out the booing during the song.  Well, it's clear that the EBU did "learn from their mistakes", but in completely the opposite way from what was demanded - they identified the places in last year's broadcast when they had allowed the full sound of the booing to slip through the net (particularly during the results section), and took all possible steps to "rectify" that.  The speaking role for the EBU executive supervisor was even cut out completely for the first time in decades, because the audience kept booing him last year.  Absolutely anything was sacrificed to protect Israel.  Anything.  This was bunker EBU and bunker Eurovision.

The only people who really came out of it with any credit were the Spanish broadcaster RTVE who put out a message in support of Palestinian rights immediately before the contest, and probably some of the members of the national juries, who it seemed to me were deliberately marking Israel down.  They probably imagined they were just making their own private protest, but in the end they may well have saved us from the ultimate catastrophe of an outright Israeli victory, because by the time the public vote was added into the mix there were only a few dozen points separating the Austrian winner and the Israeli runner-up.  Israel won the popular vote, but that was not because the European public wanted them to win.  It was simply because the Israeli diaspora throughout Europe, and right-wing nutjob sympathisers of the Netanyahu genocide, organised themselves and used their full twenty votes per phone number to create the synthetic impression that Israel was wildly popular throughout Europe.  Much the same thing happened last year, so it wasn't a huge surprise to me that Israel were so close to winning, and I voted tactically for Sweden (the pre-contest favourites) on the theory that they were most likely to avert the disaster if Israel were close.

Pretty much everything involving Israel during that broadcast was like watching a propaganda film from the Nazi era - this was a depiction of an 'alternative Europe' in which everybody is continuing to treat Israel like a normal country, and everybody is totally cool with the genocide, and everybody just adores Israeli popular music.  Even people booing Israel in an arena have to be technologically transformed into people cheering Israel in an arena.  It's just sheer cynicism.  Cynicism beyond that which we could really have thought the EBU and the BBC were even capable of until a couple of years ago.

What happened tonight cannot be allowed to happen ever again.  If the people of Palestine are still being exterminated by Israel a year from now, the broadcasters of countries like Ireland, Spain, Norway and Iceland have got to make clear they will withdraw from the contest unless Israel is excluded.  (Nobody is realistically expecting the BBC to develop a conscience any time soon.)  And if that causes other countries like Germany to storm off in a huff, I do not think that would be the end of the world by any means.

Get them OUT NOW #BanIsraelfromEurovision pic.twitter.com/DPBTSqT1TF

— 𝓑𝓵𝓪𝓴𝓮 🇸🇪 🇫🇮 🇪🇪 🇩🇪 🇲🇹 (@NllNKUCHACHACHA) May 17, 2025