Ireland will not participate in Eurovision if Israel takes part

The German policy of more or less unconditional support for Israel is plain stupid. This policy exists because of the horrors that Germans have inflicted upon Jews but it now supports similar [1] horrors inflicted by Israelis upon Palestinians. I can not wrap my head around that. If anything, Germany should try to stop Israel with all available means to protect them from themselves. Germany should do the same as Ireland and so should everyone else.

[1] Feel free to mentally replace similar with any other word that you think more accurately compares the two scenarios.

This is a very clear example of people who never live in Germany but do strong worded sentences in the internet.

There is precedent, Russia is currently suspended, also for committing war crimes.

Why single out North Korea?

All countries are equal but some counties are more equal than others?

Well, we can also leave North Korea out of the Eurovision Song Contest because it's not part of Europe.

Israel is currently committing a genocide in Palestine. It's like inviting the KKK or Nazi war criminals to board game night. Hard pass on anything including Israel until they stop the genocide and repay Palestine for the unspeakable horrors they inflicted and continue inflicting on them. Russia, another country headed by a war criminal, is also excluded.

US is an associate member, but so is Australia so you are right.

India, China, and Brazil are associate members too so they could all take part, potentially.

A thing that's maybe not obvious to Americans, and maybe even Brits is that "Public Service Broadcaster" is a category based on why it was OK for this to broadcast on the radio frequency, rather than somehow related to how it's funded.

So, NBC etc. in the US are Public Service Broadcasters, whereas a local not-for-profit that has laid their own coax in your city is not a PSB.

In the UK ITV is a PSB, as well as the BBC (which you probably think of) and Channel 4 (which is owned by the state) but if your local school media team uploads local affairs videos to Youtube that's not a PSB.

The idea is there's finite radio bandwidth, the government has decided it gets to decide who uses that bandwidth and how, and so a PSB is an entity which got licensed to use some of that finite space to do something approved. Government policies might require or forbid certain programming, for example maybe you can't advertise cigarettes or you can't swear, but you must have a news show every weekday evening.

The EBU exists because of this same bandwidth issue. Radio doesn't care about politics, so even if adjacent country A and country B hate each other and have closed their borders, the radio waves from A propagate to B and vice versa. So radio "regions" exist which try to duck the politics as much as possible to focus on practicalities. That they don't fully duck politics is how we end up with Israel in Europe but not its immediate neighbours...

The wildest one was the Tom Alexandrovich story. That guy literally committed sex crimes while in town for a tech conference and was let off - he works in our field, but it immediately got buried.

Palantir is openly named after a device of fantasy Satan. I don't think we need to wonder how evil they're being, it's always worse that you think they're being. That's what they're for.

The moderator dang has actually responded to several comments about their editorial stance re israel-palestine. I don't have time to find them but I've engaged with him personally on this several times over the last couple years.

Basically it boils down to he thinks we have talked about it enough and it annoys him how upset people are about it. And ultimately he considers admiring the technology used in war machines (and terrorism like the pager attack) to be clearly within the editorial remit of HN but that discussing their effects on the people they are used on is borderline so they police it more vigorously.

The Olympics kinda fits my perception, very important at the moment and folks really get into it... but everyone moves on a week later.

There's nothing proven about the genocide libel. That BBC article is about an association (IAGS) where anyone with $30 can join, whether they are a scholar or not. Twitter/X had a fun time with that over the last week, signing up as genocide scholars under ridiculous names. Furthermore IAGS has around 500 members, and only 129 of them voted with 86% of those supporting the resolution.

Here's 514 scholars calling for IAGS to retract: https://www.scholarsfortruthaboutgenocide.com/

“Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence. It dishonors the memory of past victims, misleads the public about present atrocities, and obstructs efforts to avert future ones,” the Friday statement said.

Because the goal of the Zionists has always been to conquer all of Palestine and the State of Israel has been following those foot steps since day one. From the river to the sea. This has been declared illegal under international law more than half a century ago but Israel does not care about the law. Therefore Israel should be forced to comply, which means boycotts and sanctions or military force. And we should probably try boycotts and sanctions first before we send tanks. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon anyway as that would mean opposing the USA and we have seen in recent history what happens to people and countries supporting the Palestinians.

Sigh...

Do you consider genocide a bad thing?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2025/israel...

Antisemitism

[flagged]

They do indeed appear to have a lot of sympathy for their friends in Hamas, who are the occupying power starving the Gazans who won't pay.

GP didn't say this action is antisemitic, just that there are rising levels of antisemitism in Ireland. If the latter is true, though, it does suggest that this action is likely motivated by antisemitism. That is, not everyone opposing Israel is antisemitic, but all the antisemites oppose Israel.

It’s a statement against a state, but the voices behind it are really referring to Jews in general. Their remark about hostages shows it. Why are there hostages in Gaza is due to actions from Hamas, not Israel.

More importantly ask yourself. Why is it that there’s not any meaningful quantity of Jews in Ireland, even though there’s larger numbers of Jews historically in nearby countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Ireland

Spain government trying to cover up their abundant corruption and economic mismanagement stoking some good old anti semitism

Luckily spaniards are better than this and Israel took the popular vote in Eurovision and is generally esteemed and respected by decent spaniards

I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you consider shameful about the current discourse about Israel?

Yet, you've mentioned in your other comment that the festival is garbage... Pathetic. But not surprising from genocide supporters.

Sure, here's an objective factual claim.

Over 65000 people were killed by the Israeli "Defense" Forces in Gaza since October 7th. 31% of them were children.

Amnesty and The International Association of Genocide Scholars both called it a genocide. The Un has announced that it's a human made famine. And the ICJ put an arrest Warren against the occupations leader.

But sure all of them are wrong and you are right.