The Judge RANTS!
Date: 11/05/24
Singing In The...Rain?
The latest winner of the Jonathan Freedland Don't Piss On My Boots And Tell Me It's Raining Award is...
<Fanfare of one thousand trumpets which have been run over by a steamroller and badly auto-tuned to compensate>
...the European Broadcasting Union!
<Sound of twelve large frogs being stamped on simultaneously>
Their winning entry was to claim that the Eurovision Song Contest conducted annually under its auspices was 'not political'. This was in response to suggestions from unfeeling heathen that to allow a state committing ongoing plausible acts of genocide to take part in it was bad in the first place, and was also somewhat lacking in consistency given that the first response of the EBU to Russia's incursion into Ukraine a little over two years ago was to kick Team Vladimir out of that same showcase for semi-musical tat.
This, of course, is an uncultured and unconscionable slur on the people who brought us such High Art as Boom Bang-A-Bang, Ding-A-Dong and Diggi-Loo, Diggi-Ley, and those responsible for it are almost certainly in the pay of Hamas, if not the Apollonian Liberation Front.
Leaving aside the satirical (or even the satyrical), the Eurovision Song Contest - like the World Cup, athletics championships and other such displacement activities for outright war, has long been a political arena. I followed the ESC diligently for about a decade from 1974, and it didn't take someone with a PPE degree from Oxbridge to spot the pattern: the Irish would never vote for the Brits (and often vice versa); the Turks would never vote for the Greeks and the Cypriots (and the feeling was mutual); and the Nordic states would give dix or douze points to one another, irrespective of how dire the product was.
There is, I'm afraid, a serious point concealed in all this, in that it is typical of Establishments of whatever sort to extrude attempts at exculpation for their own disingenuousness, dishonesty or upscrewing which they seem to think the Great Unwashed will accept when not even they themselves believe a word of it. It's the equivalent of the wife caught in bed with the postman telling her husband that it was an unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstance brought about by the fact that the milkman had been late that day; ultimately, of course, no-one was to blame and lessons will be learned.
The 'news' media have of course sought to shift the public's attention elsewhere. In the same way that they have pivoted to getting aereated about the public protests against the Gaza Genocide (which have been overwhelmingly peaceful, as this report testifies) rather than giving proper coverage of what the protests are actually about, they have twisted in their customary pretzeloid fashion to being absolutely outraged about the alleged targetting of the performer of the Zionist State's entry to the ESC. Now, there is a valid point contained in the complaint as to what degree of culpability should be attributed to the contestant; after all, she's only a singer. However, it's not as if the poor woman was conscripted to represent her land; she was, one assumes, a volunteer (because said State is, we are always told, a beacon of liberty and freedom), and would have known what she was letting herself in for (not even Israeli media try to hide what's going on in the same ways as, say, the New York Times or the BBC routinely do).
And as for Jewish people feeling 'unsafe' because of protests, then it's only natural that they would if they have been deliberately propagandised into a state of fear by those bodies - the Board of Deputies, the Community Security Trust, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and all their US equivalents - who claim to speak for them. It is, of course, almost entirely nonsense, especially given the large Jewish presence in all of the protests (who are naturally them slighted as not being 'real' Jews by those 'community leaders'. I refer the reader to this piece by Kenn Orphan at Counterpunch which exposes the bullshit dishonesty of such people.
We are, as ever, being deliberately misled.
