The public broadcasters for Spain, Ireland and Slovenia said Monday they will not show the 70th anniversary Eurovision Song Contest this week, as they boycott the TV extravaganza over Israel's participation.
The three countries, along with the Netherlands and Iceland, pulled out of this year's event in Vienna, which kicks off on Tuesday and culminates in Saturday's grand final.
Israel's war in the Gaza Strip prompted the five countries to withdraw from the world's biggest live televised music event – with Eurovision director Martin Green vowing to do "anything in our power to find a pathway back" for them.
Suspicions were raised that the public televoting system was being manipulated to boost Israel at Eurovision 2025 in Basel, Switzerland. Some broadcasters also voiced concerns about media freedom, with Israel preventing their journalists from accessing Gaza.
"Instead of the Eurovision circus, the national television programme will be coloured by the thematic programme series 'Voices of Palestine'," Slovenian broadcaster RTV said.
During Thursday's second semi-final, Ireland's RTE will be showing "The End of the World with Beanz", featuring 1993 Eurovision winner Niamh Kavanagh in Norway experiencing life as a reindeer herder.
And during the final, it will screen a Eurovision-themed episode of the popular 1990s Irish-made sitcom "Father Ted".
Spain's RTVE will run its own musical special, "The House of Music".
Public service broadcasters in the Netherlands and Iceland will screen the competition, despite neither taking part.
READ MOREEurovision hopes 70th anniversary celebration outshines Israel controversy
'We hope they come back'
Only 35 countries will take part in Eurovision this year – the fewest since entry was expanded in 2004 – following the five withdrawals.
As to whether those countries could return, Eurovision chief Green said it was "very much a conversation".
"We've got five members of our family missing this year. We miss them and we love them and we hope they come back," he told a press conference at the Wiener Stadthalle venue.
"We'll remain in conversations. We're very clear we'll do anything in our power to find a pathway back. Ultimately it's up to them and I totally respect that."
He also fielded questions about the voting system's vulnerability to manipulation.
On Saturday, Green said a warning was sent to Israel's participating broadcaster, KAN, telling it to cease putting out videos urging viewers "to vote 10 times for Israel", saying such actions were not in line with the rules and spirit of the competition.
Noting that this year professional juries were returning to the semi-finals as a counterbalance to the public vote, "we have one of the most safest, secure and fair voting systems," Green told reporters.
Amnesty decries 'cowardice'
First held in 1956, Eurovision is run by the European Broadcasting Union, the world's biggest alliance of public-service media.
Amnesty International said that the EBU's failure to suspend Israel from Eurovision, as it did with Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was "an act of cowardice and an illustration of blatant double standards".
Israel's participation "offers the country a platform to try to deflect attention from and normalise its ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip", Amnesty's secretary general Agnès Callamard said in a statement.
"Songs and sequins must not be allowed to drown out or distract from Israel's atrocities or Palestinian suffering."
A UN-backed probe in September determined that "genocide is occurring in Gaza" – something Israel vehemently denies.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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Antisemitism, From China to Peru
Samuel Johnson’s poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” opens with this line: “Let Observation with extensive View, / Survey Mankind, from China to Peru.” We all know that there is currently an epidemic of anti-Israel animus closely linked to antisemitism, spreading throughout much of the world. That includes even China, where the government has adopted an anti-Israel policy not out of deep belief, but in order to curry favor with the Muslim states and undermine America’s position in the Middle East. And now we learn that Peru — the other endpoint of Johnson’s sweep of our giddy globe in an iambic pentameter couplet — has not been spared antisemitism. More on the surprising outburst from Peru’s interim president, José María Balcázar, can be found here:
Peruvian president claims Jews pushed Germany into war because ‘they controlled banks'
by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2026:
Peruvian President Jose Maria Balcazar has sparked outrage after claiming that Jews were partly responsible for “pushing” Germany into war.
The comments were made on Tuesday in a speech during a ceremony for the 138th anniversary of the Chamber of Commerce of Lima. Balcazar referenced a book called Los enemigos del comercio (“The enemies of commerce”) by Antonio Escohotado, saying that the arguments in the book should be recognized.
Oh dear. Those warmongering Jews, always trying to start wars. Remember 1948, when without the slightest provocation, the mighty Israelis simultaneously attacked five of its Arab neighbors. Or think of 1967, when the Israelis falsely claimed that Egypt was preparing to invade just because Nasser chose to whip up Cairene crowds, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, by promising them that Egypt’s army would “soon be in Tel Aviv,” and that would be an end to Israel, and used that as an excuse to launch a sneak attack on the too-trusting Egyptians. And the Israelis started every conflict between Israel and the Arabs, including those with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Doesn’t everyone know that Israel tricked the U.S. into attacking Iran? True, for 47 years, the Islamic Republic has been denouncing America on every conceivable and many not so conceivable occasions, has supported the terror group Hezbollah that was responsible for killing 241 Marines and other American military personnel in 1983 as they slept in their Beirut barracks, took U.S. embassy personnel hostage and held them for 444 days, and has repeatedly organized mass demonstrations across Iran, where American flags are trampled on and then set on fire, while demonstrators denounce the “Great Satan.” And true, the Iranians have been working furiously on ballistic missiles capable of hitting America’s east coast, and on their nuclear program which, if completed successfully, would provide the world’s most dangerous weapon to the world’s most dangerous country. But was that really enough to make the U.S. go to war? It was the diabolical Israelis who convinced Trump to attack Iran. And in the same vein, Peruvian President José María Balcázar knows that World War II was started by “the Jews.” It was they who “pushed Germany” — innocent naïve peace-loving Nazi Germany — into World War II.
Balcazar then said, “It is a monument to the history of commerce: how bills of exchange were born, how international trade moved, what role the Jews had in Germany’s national and international trade, how Germany was pushed into a war also partly because of the Jews because they controlled all the banks, all the commerce, and practiced usury.
He, El Señor Presidente, repeated such timeworn antisemitic tropes as the one about Jews controlling all the banks in the world, which would make them the hidden masters of our fate. Why is it that those who accuse Jews of controlling the universe — all the banks, all the media, all of everything — never ask themselves if that is true, how is it, then, that those all-powerful Jews have never been able to prevent themselves being victims, over many centuries of persecution in many different places, and ending with the final hideous apocalypse of Jew-murdering during the Holocaust?
The murdered Jews were not just German nationals. They were from Poland, Russia, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, France, Belgium, Italy, even the U.K. (Jews taken by the Nazis from the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey were sent to extermination camps.)
Balcázar has been made to apologize for his intolerable remarks blaming Jews for “pushing” Germany into World War II, in order to dampen criticism that might harm Peru’s international standing. But I wonder what Balcázar, who seems to have been so greatly impressed by that one book, The enemies of commerce, by Antonio Escohotado, really thinks. And I also wonder whether in the future, say a decade or two from now, the virus of antisemitism will still be found “from China to Peru,” or will it be put back in its bottle by people who understand that Islam is coming not just for “the Jews,” but for all of us.
The UK Has Become a Racist Nation
British journalist Jake Wallis Simons discusses the epidemic of antisemitism in Great Britain, including the surging support for the Green Party, which despite its name is less about environmentalism and more about the putative sins of Israel and, by extension, “the Jews”:
It is impossible to imagine a political party built around loathing for black people attracting any meaningful support in Britain. Today, however, as the results of the local elections come in, it is clear that the same is not true for the Jews.
I speak, of course, of the Green Party, that deplorable alliance of hard-left fanatics and Islamists that has seduced up to 20 per cent of the vote, or nine million people, according to recent polls. Reform’s stonking success may be stealing the headlines but the Greens are performing strongly, and on current trends, this is only the beginning.
Clearly, the evil genius that is Zack Polanski has found a winning formula. It is a plan based not on policy but prejudice. He is a master of social media, the king of the soft exterior which he uses to seduce a public with little attention to detail.
Polanski knows the game because he understands the shallowness of his audience. It is this mass dullness, this susceptibility to propaganda, this narcissistic tribalism, this lamentable lack of curiosity that lies behind the rise of the most racist party in British political history.
Because running through all this is the animal spirit of antisemitism. I’d hazard a guess that Green voters aren’t attracted by policies such as legalising heroin or creating a “world without borders”. Give them a way to express their loathing of Israel at the ballot box, however, and they’re right behind you….
Muslim fanatics murdering Jews in London and Manchester, anti-Israel mobs on the streets who call for the destruction of Israel (“from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), and for attacks on Jews everywhere (“globalize the Intifada”), the shouting down of pro-Israel speakers, the pro-Hamas student protesters harassing and attacking Jewish classmates on campus are all the evidence one needs of antisemitism, both causing, and caused by, anti-Israel animus.
And now we have the local elections on May 7, when the Green Party, with the antisemitic statements of many of its candidates recently publicized in a Labour Party campaign ad intended to lessen the party’s support, did not suffer one whit, but instead managed to win hundreds of new seats. Starmer was too weak to deal with this matter; he’s on his way out, but will his replacement do any better in making the fight against antisemitism a priority?
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