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The Media Painted Israel’s Eurovision Entry as ‘Divisive’ — Viewers Made Her a Star

Yuval Raphael from Israel with the title “New Day Will Rise” on stage at the second semi-final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest in the Arena St. Jakobshalle. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect

If you were reading the media’s Eurovision coverage ahead of Saturday night’s live final, you could be forgiven for thinking Europe was on the brink of revolt — not over the music, but because Israel was allowed to compete.

For days, major outlets drip-fed a steady stream of articles focused less on the music and more on the “divisiveness” of Israel’s singer, Yuval Raphael. The contest was held in Basel, Switzerland — in keeping with tradition that the previous year’s winner hosts the following year’s event. But instead of coverage on costumes, staging, or song predictions, much of the press zeroed in on Israel.

Take the Associated Press, which on May 16 published a piece headlined: “Israel’s presence still roils Eurovision a year after major protests over the war in Gaza.” The article detailed a protest in Basel the night before the final — involving 200 people, “many draped in Palestinian flags,” demanding Israel’s expulsion from the competition.

That’s 200 people. In a city hosting an event watched by 160 million.

But beyond the AP’s decision to devote an entire article to a relatively small protest, it’s what the piece doesn’t say that stands out.

The article solemnly describes demonstrators marching “in silence down a street noisy with music and Eurovision revelry” — conferring a quiet dignity to the scene — while omitting that just days earlier, protesters in the same city were filmed shouting death threats and that one man was caught miming the slitting of Yuval Raphael’s throat.

The article also recites the protestors’ talking point: “Russia was banned after invading Ukraine, so why not Israel?” A responsible journalist might have added a key bit of context: Eurovision is a contest between broadcasters, and Russia’s state broadcaster was disqualified for breaching contest rules. Israel, by contrast, was attacked by Hamas on October 7, and its broadcaster KAN was not accused of doing anything wrong.

NBC News took an even more dramatic tone with its headline: “United by music, divided on Israel: Eurovision tensions bubble up in famously neutral Switzerland.” Readers were told that protests over Israel’s participation had reached a “fever pitch,” and that “Basel, and Europe at large, are anything but united.”

A fever pitch? For 200 people with flags — and little more than death threats for a 24-year-old woman?

The AFP joined the chorus with a headline on May 11: “Parade, protests kick off Eurovision Song Contest week.” But even that article opened with a contradictory statement: “The Swiss city is hosting the 69th edition of the world’s biggest annual live televized music event, reaching around 160 million viewers.”

In other words: massive global interest. And yet, we’re meant to believe the event was overshadowed by a protest that could barely fill a city square.

The UK media did its part too. On May 10, the BBC reported: “Israel heads to Eurovision final, despite protests” — a headline designed to suggest Raphael had narrowly slipped through under a cloud of outrage.

Meanwhile, The Independent vaguely claimed that “tensions” had erupted over Israel’s performance, without saying who was tense, or why.

The same publication even attempted to reframe one of the anti-Israel protestors who tried to storm the stage when Raphael was singing during the final as the victim, running a lead that defies belief:

Pro Palestine protester’s hair pulled as attempted Eurovision disruption blocked.

And The Guardian ran multiple pieces implying Israel’s participation was in jeopardy, after national broadcasters from Spain and Ireland requested a “discussion” over Israel’s inclusion.

 

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Israel Triumphs in Public Vote

So after all the noise, what happened?

Israel came first in the audience vote.

Yuval Raphael placed second overall in the competition, with 357 points. Austria’s winner received 436 points. But here’s the key detail: Israel scored 297 points from the public, compared to just 60 from the jury. Austria, by contrast, received 178 from the public and 258 from juries.

In other words: if the public alone had decided, Israel would have won.

Israel earned the maximum 12 points in the public vote from the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Australia, and Portugal — all of whose juries gave her zero. In Ireland, where the broadcaster led the charge to discuss Israel’s participation, the public gave Israel 10 points, and the jury gave 7.

For all the media’s insistence that Israel’s presence was unwelcome, millions of ordinary viewers voted otherwise.

And yet, even as the final aired, broadcasters continued to undermine Israel.

Spain’s RTVE ignored warnings from the European Broadcasting Union and allowed its presenters to recite unverifiable casualty figures: “The victims of the Israeli attacks in Gaza now exceed 50,000, including more than 15,000 children, according to the United Nations.” (The UN has issued no such definitive number.) Before the broadcast began, RTVE aired a message: “In the face of human rights, silence is not an option. Peace and justice for Palestine.”

Will Spain face disqualification next year for politicizing the contest on-air? Don’t hold your breath.

Even the BBC’s Graham Norton seemed to join the pattern of omission, describing Yuval Raphael as a newcomer who only began singing in 2023 after appearing on Israel’s Rising Star. He neglected to mention she is also a survivor of the October 7 massacre at the Nova music festival — where she hid under the bodies of others who were murdered.

Let’s be honest: much of the media wasn’t reporting on Eurovision — it was campaigning within it. The press wanted to make Israel’s participation look controversial. They wanted Yuval Raphael to lose. That, for them, would have been the ultimate verdict: a musical referendum on Israel.

But they failed.

The audience saw through it. The public voted. And Israel’s Yuval Raphael sang — and soared.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post The Media Painted Israel’s Eurovision Entry as ‘Divisive’ — Viewers Made Her a Star first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘All Hamas, Out!’ New Round of Palestinian Protests Erupt in Gaza Against Ruling Terror Group

Palestinians protest to demand an end to war, chanting anti-Hamas slogans, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, March 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Anti-Hamas protests erupted in the Gaza Strip for a third straight day on Wednesday, after indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group in Qatar failed to yield any breakthroughs.

Since Monday, hundreds of protesters in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis have taken to the streets to rally against Hamas, which has ruled the war-torn Palestinian enclave for nearly two decades, and to call for an end to the war with Israel, as captured in footage shared by local news outlets and widely circulated on social media.

According to local reports, protests spread across multiple neighborhoods in Khan Younis, with many demonstrators demanding that Hamas give up control of Gaza.

Protesters had similarly gathered in Khan Younis, a long-time Hamas stronghold, on Monday and Tuesday demanding, “All of Hamas, out!”

This week’s protests against the terrorist group in Gaza are the first in several weeks, coming after a series of demonstrations in northern parts of the Strip in March and April.

During the first wave of protests in the early spring, thousands of Palestinians across the enclave took to the streets to protest against Hamas, calling for an end to the war and condemning the terrorist group’s rule.

Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group and offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, violently eliminated its Palestinian opposition in a brief conflict in 2007, taking full control of Gaza after winning legislative elections the prior year.

In footage circulated on social media, demonstrators were seen in the first round of demonstrations chanting slogans such as “Down with Hamas, we’ve had enough,” “For God’s sake, Hamas out,” “We want an end to the war,” and “Hamas terrorists.”

At the time, several prominent activists and social media influencers had gone missing, with local reports indicating that some were being tortured and killed.

The Palestinian terrorist group accused Israel of inciting the demonstrations and warned of punishment for those involved.

According to local reports, Hamas had been persecuting Palestinians who participated in such protests, executing six individuals and publicly beating others.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) released a poll earlier this month showing that nearly half of Gazans support the anti-Hamas protests.

The terrorist group has a history of violently attacking those it considers to be “collaborators” with Israel. Earlier this year, the terrorist group executed 11 people for allegedly doing so in what its aligned media termed a “punishment of bullets.”

While Hamas is trying to silence dissent and crack down on the demonstrations, the group is also confronting Israel’s renewed operations as the Israeli military targets terrorist operatives in the territory.

Earlier this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a wide evacuation order for all of Khan Younis, declaring the area a “combat zone” ahead of what it called an “unprecedented attack” aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure and pressuring Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages still being held by the Islamist group.

As part of its ongoing ground offensive dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots,” Israel’s military has struck over 670 Hamas targets in Gaza over the past week.

Tensions on the ground intensified after ceasefire negotiations between the Jewish state and the Palestinian terrorist group in Qatar stalled without yielding any progress.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the recent talks in Doha covered a potential truce and hostage exchange, along with a proposal to end the war in exchange for the exile of Hamas terrorists and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip — terms that Hamas has previously rejected.

The latest PCPSR poll from earlier this month found that the perception that Hamas would win the war has dropped precipitously since it began. Just 23 percent of Gazans said they think Hamas will win the current war, while 29 percent responded they think Israel will win, and 46 percent put neither side will win. In contrast, 50 percent of Gazans thought Hamas would win back in December 2023, while 31 percent thought Israel would win.

The post ‘All Hamas, Out!’ New Round of Palestinian Protests Erupt in Gaza Against Ruling Terror Group first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Dartmouth College Committee Rejects Anti-Israel Divestment Proposal

Students walking on a college campus. Photo: Fortune via Reuters Connect.

Dartmouth College’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) has unanimously rejected a proposal which urged the school to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and explained the decision in a lengthy report, dealing the anti-Zionist campus movement another major setback.

“By a vote of nine to zero, the [ACIR] at Dartmouth College finds that the divestment proposal submitted by Dartmouth Divest for Palestine and dated Feb. 18, 2025, does not meet criteria, laid out in the Dartmouth Board of Trustees’ Statement on Investment and Social Responsibility and in ACIR’s charge, that must be satisfied for the proposal to undergo further review,” the report said. “ACIR recommends not to advance the proposal.”

A copy of the document reviewed by The Algemeiner shows that the committee evaluated the BDS proposal, submitted by a group which calls itself Dartmouth Divest for Palestine (DDP), based on five criteria regarding the college’s divestment history, capacity to address controversial issues through discourse and learning, and campus unity. It concluded that DDP “partially” met one of them by demonstrating that Dartmouth has divested from a country or industry in the past to establish its moral credibility on pressing cultural and geopolitical issues but noted that its analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacks nuance, betraying the group’s “lack of engagement with counter arguments.”

ACIR added that DDP also does not account for the sheer divisiveness of BDS — which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — and its potential to “degrade” rather than facilitate “additional dialogue on campus.”

It continued, “The proposal includes no compelling evidence on the level of support for divestment among students, among faculty, among staff, and among alumni. Moreover, the [roposal is silent on the matter of how divestment can be treated as a consensus position in the face of what is almost certainly deep opposition to it among some members of the Dartmouth community.”

Writing to The Dartmouth, DDP reiterated an argument that — in addition to echoing the propaganda of neo-Nazi groups and jihadist terrorist organizations — has been deemed as fallacious by Dartmouth and other colleges and universities across the US.

“Our coalition of students, alumni, faculty, and staff remain committed to the basic principle behind our proposal: institutions of higher learning should not be invested in weapons companies and other corporations complicit in genocide, scholasticide, and violations of international law,” the group’s statement said. “Such investments are not in keeping with Dartmouth’s academic mission and its responsibility to its community and the broader world.”

Dartmouth College is not the first higher education institution to foreclose divestment from Israel.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine did so in March when its Board of Trustees voted to accept the counsel of a committee that recommended maintaining investment practices which safeguard the institution’s financial health and educational mission.

“The endowment exists solely to provide financial support of the college across generations,” said a report submitted to trustees in February and, according to The Bowdoin Orient, subsequently ratified by them. “It should not be used as a tool for the advocacy of public policy.”

The reported, authored by the college’s Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility, continued, “Interventions in the management of the endowment that are rooted in moral or political considerations should be exceedingly rare and restricted to those cases where there is near-universal consensus among Bowdoin’s community of stakeholders … if such actions are pursued, they should be taken only where the financial trade-offs are identifiable, measurable, and limited.”

Boston University rejected BDS in February, with its president, Melissa Gilliam, saying, “the endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East.”

Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”

The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.

Colleges and universities will squander tens of billions of dollars in endowment returns if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September 2024 by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.

The losses JLens projected are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion in growth, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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Irish Rap Group Kneecap Threatens to Sue Industry Critics Calling for Glastonbury Ban After Anti-Israel Remarks

Members of Kneecap pose on the red carpet at the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) Awards in Dublin, Ireland, February 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo

The Irish rap group Kneecap has threatened to sue music industry figures who have allegedly called for organizers of the Glastonbury Festival in the United Kingdom to remove the trio from its lineup of performers following anti-Israel comments and other offensive remarks made by group members.

Kneecap is currently being investigated by counter-terrorism police in the UK after footage emerged online of them shouting “up Hezbollah, up Hamas” and “kill your local MP [Member of Parliament]” at concerts in 2023 and 2024. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are designated by the UK as terrorist organizations, and it is illegal in the UK to express support for the two Iran-backed Islamist groups.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed on Monday that a man was interviewed in Belfast on Sunday as part of an ongoing investigation related to the videos and that there are “grounds for further investigation into potential offenses” relating to the footage. The clips surfaced online after Kneecap stirred controversy by projecting anti-Israel messages on stage during their performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California in April. “F–k Israel, Free Palestine” and “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people” were both projected onto the stage backdrop.

Meanwhile, Communities Minister Gordon Lyons said on Monday he thinks the UK and Irish governments should “consider their actions” in relation to providing any fundings to Kneecap, RTE reported. During ministerial question time at the Northern Ireland Assembly, Lyons was asked if he thinks the UK and Irish governments should “distance themselves from the funding of racist, antisemitic, and sectarian state sponsorship in the view of Kneecap.”

“There are always things we can disagree with which other people do in the arts sphere, but this is going far beyond anything which comes anywhere close to dealing with artistic license,” Lyons said in response. “This is the glorification of terrorism and this is also supporting, calling for violence towards MPs. It is incumbent on us to call that out, and I would also call on the UK government and the Irish government to consider their actions in this regard.”

Lyons added that neither his department “nor any of its arm’s length bodies” have provided any funding to Kneecap since 2017.

Glastonbury organizers have been facing pressure to ban the group from the iconic music festival from music industry figures, politicians in the UK, and also pro-Israel supporters in the entertainment industry, including Sharon Osbourne, a former judge on “The X Factor” and the wife of Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne. A number of music industry figures recently sent an email to Glastonbury founder Emily Eavis and two other organizers of the festival, urging them to ban Kneecap from the event set to take place from June 25-29, the Daily Mail reported.

In response, Kneecap’s legal team, Phoenix Law, issued a formal letter to those individuals, threatening to sue them for pressuring Glastonbury organizers to drop the band from the music festival. Kneecap said the music industry figures should issue an “immediate and unequivocal” apology or face legal action.

“Your correspondence seeks to monopolize your status within the industry to impose direct and concerted pressure on Glastonbury, to restrict freedom of expression,” said the legal letter, as reported by the Daily Mail. “Such a direct and coordinated approach seeks to create a chilling effect upon the wider music industry whereby those who hold opposing views, will seek to impose their own view on the wider industry,” it further stated.

“Whilst our clients feel particularly strongly about the freedom of expression, we cannot allow false statements to be asserted dressed up as statements of fact,” Kneecap’s representatives said in the legal letter. “To that end, we write to put you on notice that we are now formally instructed to commence high court civil proceedings for damages for the damage you have inflicted on our client’s reputation. However, before our clients formally seek to issue pre action correspondence, we write to offer you the opportunity to resolve these matters by way of an immediate and unequivocal apology.”

Glastonbury organizers have yet to comment on Kneecap’s offensive remarks and the pressure they are facing to remove the Irish group from the music festival.

So far, Kneecap have been dropped from a number of music festivals this summer — including two in Germany and the Eden Project concert series in the UK — in light of their offensive comments. Others, such as the Wide Awake Festival in southern London, have not canceled their performance and defended the band.

In April, Kneecap apologized and clarified its remarks from 2023 and 2024 in a released statement.

“Let us be unequivocal: we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah. We condemn all attacks on civilians,” the group said in part. “We also reject any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual. An extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponized, as if it were a call to action.”

In the same statement, Kneecap continued to make anti-Israel remarks, accusing the Jewish state of genocide. The group has made similar anti-Israel comments many times and continues to do so on social media.

“Israel is the most depraved regime on earth,” Kneecap wrote in a post on X on May 14. “They lie day after day and are starving an entire population to death, whilst a few miles away Israeli kids eat fast food … This is supported by Western governments and it’s unforgivable.”

On May 9, the band shared on X a picture of the message “Israel is committing a genocide” being projected on the former Israeli Embassy in Dublin. Kneecap said it projected the anti-Israel message on the embassy last November, before the embassy closed amid tensions between Dublin and Jerusalem over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The post Irish Rap Group Kneecap Threatens to Sue Industry Critics Calling for Glastonbury Ban After Anti-Israel Remarks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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