If you’re after some harmless fun, here’s an idea. Have a scroll through social media and enjoy the posts about Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest from the assorted brigades of Jew haters and anti-Israel types. Watching their total inability to come to terms with the audience vote across Europe, which put Israel top, is something to behold.
One theme is well represented: that the only way the Jews could have won public support is by being Jewy and using nefarious methods – specifically, their vast amounts of money. “There is no way Israel had the Europe popular vote, but it's a dog that pays well.” “Israel payed [sic] for people to vote for them and not for the UK.” “Israel doing phone card and credit card farming to vote up to and over a hundred times a person.”
So angry was the Spanish state broadcaster RTVE, which broadcast pro-Palestinian statements during the competition, that Israel had not been barred that it has now reportedly demanded an audit of the country’s audience votes after Israel came second in its national vote.
But one of my favourite posts posits a brilliant theory as to why Israel topped the poll: “Isn’t it obvious? The weirdos supporting the no-country will vote for Israel, but since there’s no ‘anti-Israel’ option, the votes get dispersed among all the other countries.” If you’re struggling to cope with the idea that most people not only didn’t want to see Israel barred from the competition, they wanted to see it win, it’s a kind of genius explanation as to why what happened didn’t really happen. The organisers had better remember next year to add ‘anti-Israel’ as a 38th country to the voting options.
There’s a common theme to many of the posts, well represented by this one: “Look at the streets worldwide. Massive protests. This is the only vote you should pay attention to.” That sums up the mindset of the anti-Israel crowd – they take to the streets in large numbers so it should be obvious to anyone that they represent the majority. That’s a pretty standard mindset for any demonstration – an inability to comprehend that just because you feel strongly about an issue, and just because a lot of other people also feel strongly, it doesn’t mean that you are speaking for anyone except yourself.
So when you prepare to storm the stage and throw fake blood at a competitor who, 18 months ago, spent eight hours hiding under a pile of dead bodies in order to survive, you are not speaking for anyone except yourself – indeed you are shouting about yourself to the world, and when the world hears you it reacts not by cheering you but by cheering your intended victim.
The outraged and deeply puzzled social media posters make a fundamental mistake. Like their fellow bigots and racists throughout history, they assume that most people share their bigotry and racism. But as the vote showed both this year and last, they don’t. Here in the UK, Israel topped the audience poll – as it did when all the votes cast across Europe were aggregated.
It's not a scientific poll, of course. No one suggests it is. But those who dismiss it suggest the very opposite: that they speak for the majority. Simply put, they don’t. It behoves no one to make unsubstantiated claims about public opinion, least of all on the back of a vote in a song contest. The Eurovision vote isn’t an interrogation of Israeli policy or even of the war itself. But it c an be seen as an expression that Israel is understood – that far from regarding it as barbaric and genocidal, those who voted for Israel regard it as part of the community of nations. And at the very least, that a song contest should be about music, not politics. Which is all Israel needs or wants.
