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Comment by przems | Hacker News Reader

I am glad to see this news and I hope more countries join in. Their efforts to sneak in pro-genocidal messaging through song lyrics, the buying of YouTube ads in most European countries to get as many votes as possible, and the ongoing attempts by EBU to silence all voices that are critical of their efforts to exterminate the people whose land they're occupying; it all makes me disgusted to see countries like Germany coming out with the opposite announcement of boycotting ESC if Israel won't be able to participate. Of course, EBU will not disqualify Israel from Eurovision, and the reason is obvious for anyone who has checked the list of their sponsors.

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>>hope more countries join in

By the looks of it, besides Ireland (in OP), Iceland ( https://www.ruv.is/english/2025-09-09-iceland-may-not-take-p... ) and Spain ( https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2025/09/11/spain-thr... ) have also stated their intention to boycott.

I didn't watch Israel's song. I didn't watch any youtube ads (thanks adblock), yet I spent 20 euros on Israel to stop the shameful anti Israel discourse.

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

If it's not evident I can't do much. The constant outpour of media content that depicts Israel as cruel and unfair despite there being no real story. The constant conflation of Israel with antisemitic stereotypes. The denial of Israel's right to exist in both subtle and gross ways.

European left isn't giving any path to Israel to get respect, they will attack Israel no matter what they do.

depicts Israel as cruel and unfair despite there being no real story

No real story like shooting an unarmed civilian, waiting for relatives to come to recover the body, then shooting them too?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-famil...

This is only bad if you value Palestinians as people. Occasionally the media does that, despite incentives to the contrary.

In media, "Israel" refers to the current government of Israel and the actions that are done on its behalf. The evidences of war crimes are countless and irrefutable.

Nobody with half a brain conflates Israel's government with Judaism or with the Israeli people, ... but Israel's intelligence services have for a long time had the tactic to influence people to conflate them so as to be able to deflect criticism against its state as being anti-semitism — and they have been quite successful at that.

Similarly, antisemitic groups have taken advantage of the worldwide movement against what Israel is doing in Gaza and sometimes managed to insert themselves and their message among legitimate protests. For instance, this summer an MP in my country had retweeted an image containing symbolism that she didn't understand — which caused her party to (over)react and exclude her.

I am sure that there is a lot of misleading propaganda going left and right within Israel as well.

It is important to be careful and identify things for what they are.

What conflation of Israel with antisemitic stereotypes? Is murdering 10's of thousands of women and children an antisemitic stereotype? Does expressing that Palestinian people are entitled to civil/human rights and self-determination some how deny Israel's right to exist?

The sooner you stop seeing this as a "right vs left" debate and start seeing it as a human catastrophe, the sooner you will start to understand why some people take issue in what Israel is currently doing.

> there being no real story.

Ok, dude. I cannot educate you if you actively refuse to follow the news.

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

For those of us who dabble in history, it's not far fetched to see why the Irish people isn't sympathetic towards an occupying force.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1233395830/ireland-pro-palest...

What is so surprising to us who know history is that the Irish are supporting the colonizers. Jews are in their homeland. It's the Arabs who are colonizers.

There are 38 million Americans who identify as Irish. Is America the Irish homeland? No, it's Ireland.

To those who say Jews are colonizers: where is the Jewish homeland?

I've heard people say Poland, where Auschwitz is, thus revealing their true colors.

By that logic where is the Christian homeland? Jesus was born in Bethlehem, does that give all Christians a right to displace the people who live there?

Similarly the Irish are famous for being ethnically a Celtic people. The Celts originated in Hallstatt, Austria, so does that entitle any Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scot or Welsh person to turn up and settle on the shores of the Hallstätter See?

All humans trace their origins back to Mesopotamia, can we all claim some land in Iraq too?

Maybe that's why Bush invaded Iraq, he just wanted the land of his ancestors

> What is so surprising to us who know history is that the Irish are supporting the colonizers. Jews are in their homeland. It's the Arabs who are colonizers.

You are being dishonest or severely brainwashed.

Ethnic groups doesn't have homelands, people born under a nation state [2] have homelands.

Israel was founded in 1948. You already know this.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Israel_(1948%E2%80%...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

its a rich mans world...

> efforts to exterminate the people whose land they're occupying

Just because activists say a thing doesn't make it true. You should make more objective factual claims instead of ambiguously defined or made up ones.

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.

Thank you. That's much more constructive and you can see from another reply that people are now able to evaluate and challenge them because they're claims of fact.

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

When “roughly half” of Gaza’s population “are under the age of 18,” your statistic actually describes discretion [1]. As for total kills, the data I’ve seen on CCRs put the IDF’s actions in the precedents range of guerrilla wars.

The way the IDF is conducting the war is, unfortunately, normal. What is not normal is the restriction of food, detention conditions and Netanyahu joining the Russia/China/Turkey club (along with Trump) on throwing out international law.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/18/1206897328/half-of-gazas-popu...

There's plenty of evidence that fact is true, it's not even worth discussing at this point

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.

Let's not forget Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

But many Israel supporters live in a reality distortion field where they're eternal victims and therefore can do no wrong. No amount of well documented war crimes or obvious lies from the Israeli government will make a dent, because Palestinian lives have exactly zero value to them.

Honestly, they could be. Have you read those sources? Here's something I found from Amnesty International.

6.1.1 DIRECT ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS OR INDISCRIMINATE ATTACKS It lists 15 cases of air strikes which it uses to support its claim of killing/harming members of a group which is part of the definition of genocide. However, all/nearly all of them say "Amnesty International did not find any evidence of a military objective.". So it seems possible Amnesty just doesn't know the secret military information and Israel didn't disclose it to them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Do you believe there can't possibly have been any military objectives that make those air strikes legitimate?

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/

If a state attacks, just for example, civilian hospitals (which typically do not contain valid military targets) then, in my view, the burden of proof lies on the attacking state.

Leaving aside, of course, the fact that attacking a civilian hospital, even one that has some military targets in it (say wounded combatants), would also certainly mean killing or injuring many invalid targets, and at that point you should really provide not just evidence of a military target but also evidence that you couldn't attack the target in any other way and that the target is valuable enough to justify the deaths of innocent people.

Which Israel has not done, and really, can't do. Because there really aren't many targets worth bombing a hospital for.

Well yea if there was a trial. But now it's just a trial by media and guilty until proven innocent. That's not a good way to reach the correct conclusion.

Hamas had bases in hospitals. Not just wounded fighters being treated. They stored weapons and housed fighters in them. They also built underground bases directly underneath hospital buildings. They specifically chose hospitals because they thought that would protect them from being attacked but it does make those hospitals a legitimate target.

Do you mean the claim that there was a command center under al-Shifa hospital? That was debunked over 18 months ago by multiple sources. None of the attacks on hospitals have been justifiable under the Geneva Conventions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67453105 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/idf-evidence-s...

Those aren't debunkings, they're "Israel hasn't convinced us yet."s.

> So it seems possible Amnesty just doesn't know the secret military information and Israel didn't disclose it to them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Do you believe there can't possibly have been any military objectives that make those air strikes legitimate?

We don't know for sure that Hind Rajab wasn't planning attacks when she was supposed to be learning the alphabet either.

Maybe she was leading a Hamas cell with a crayon, but the intelligence is too crucial to share!

This style of argument is absurd.

One person being killed isn't a genocide or extermination.

No killing one person is not genocide, it's a murder.

Killing 10,000's of women and children from a specific ethnic group, razing a significant percentage of buildings to the ground and forcibly displacing almost 2 million people while using starvation as a weapon of war, that's genocide.

What else could they have done?

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