Eurovision Song Contest 2024: Unfair to the bone

As we are just 2 days away from the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 finals, I thought I should write an article about a couple of incidents that shook last year's contest. I myself am not a huge fan of the Eurovision, that is, I don't watch fanatically all those interviews with the participants neither do I hear the majority of the songs before the grand final.

Joost Klein, the Ode to Europe and the out-of-place disqualifiqation

Joost Klein was chosen to represent his country, the Netherlands, with the pro-European song "Europapa". Apart from its positive message, the song was also pretty catchy, which made it finish second during the semifinal, just behind Israel. It was thus a pretty awkward situation for the EBU when it was announced the Joost Klein would be disqualified due to an alleged incident with a camerawoman.

Despite all the claims of some sort of incident, it was apparent from the very beginning that something like that was pretty unlikely to have happened. In such a huge contest like Eurovision, there are cameras everywhere and such an incident would pretty unlikely go unrecorded. The case was dropped on August, after the contest had ended. It is pretty likely that had Joost been allowed to participate, he might have reached the Top 3 best performers of that year's Eurovision contest. There have been suggestion that Joost was banished from the contest due to his pro-Palestinian views, but that's just a theory

Israel, the Gaza war and the EBU's treatment against pro-Palestinian activists

Before I begin, I want to clarify a couple of things:

Israel was represented in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 by singer Eden Golan. Eden Golan is an Israeli national that has lived in Moscow for most of her life. In 2016, after the Russian invasion and occupation of the Crimean peninsula, she performed at the New Wave contest. She was essentially forced to leave the Russian Federation after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is not thus dubious to say that Golan has a pretty questionable background

The song with which Golan was chosen to participate has itself generated controversy. While it talks about the massacre of October 7, which was an unquestionable terrosist attack, the IDF's actions against Palestinian civilians had already generated much controversy by the time she were to perform on Eurovision. While all of us agree that it is necessary for militant organizations like Hamas to cease existing, actions like killing civilians will most definitely not help with that, if not, they will radicalize more Palestinians.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has imposed devastating sanctions on the Russian Federation, which has performed a number of war crimes against Ukrainian civilians. Yet, even thought such similar situations have been observed from the IDF, no meaningful action has essentially been taken. The least we could do is remove the State of Israel from the contest until the IDF can ensure the safety of the Palestinian civilians. Yes, Hamas must be destroyed, but the most recent plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are distressing at least

Eurovision: the (supposedly) apolitical contest

On the one hand, the EBU, the organizer of the Eurovision Song Contest claims that it tried to keep the contest as much apolitical as possible. That's what they said when they rejected the Ukrainian president's, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, request to address the audience during the final of the 2023 contest, as well as prohibiting the audience from raising Palestinian flag and, more recently, prohibiting artists from using any other flag than the country they represent, including pride and European flags. On the other hand, they allowed Israel to compete both in 2024 and 2025 with two (2) songs about the October 7 massacre and also suspended Russia's participation in 2022. In other words, the claim that the Eurovision is an apolitical contest is pure BS. All these are just signs of a weak management. For a contest whose now permanent slogan is "United by Music", that seems to be something that they aren't doing pretty well. In the end, the majority of EBU country members are also members of the European Union, so maybe it is about time for them to step in and bring end to this chaos