When is a small win a large win? When the effect in the material world is small, but the groundswell in the heart is large.
Activists tried to have Israel barred from the Eurovision Song Contest, thousands protested in Sweden (baying outside the contestant’s hotel), a drag artist moaned on BBC Newsnight that he would cancel his Eurovision party due to Israel’s inclusion in the event and fellow Eurovision contestants whinged and bullied the 20-year-old Israeli singer, Eden Golan.
Yet what was the final result? Despite a poor show from the Eurovision juries, Israel won the public’s ‘douze points’ tele-vote in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the ‘rest of the world’ category. Israel received the second highest public vote and came fifth overall.
Why were so many motivated to vote for Israel’s Eden Golan? It’s impossible to be certain, but it will surely be a combination of factors. The song itself and her voice were excellent and the performance was solid. That should be all you need to do well in a supposedly non-political song contest. Evidently there was more to it than that.
This vote could be taken as a show of support for a young artist who was mercilessly bullied. Most normal, sympathetic people do not like bullies and will support the underdog. Regardless of where you stand on Israel, Hamas, Gaza and the war, it was horrible to see a young woman ostracised by her peers, threatened with professional exclusion and hounded by an actual mob. I am sure that many new and returning viewers tuned in specifically to support this brave woman.
It could also be seen a show of support for Israel herself. Highly visible elites and artists may downplay October 7th (or the “Hamas thing” as Gary Lineker recently referred to it) and feel emboldened to display their Israelophobia and antisemitism, but the popular vote indicates that the majority have had enough of virtue-signalling terrorist-sympathisers.
If you wanted to support Israel in the face of bullying then, naturally, you supported Israel. But if you were ‘anti-Israel’ which country would you vote for? Perhaps Ireland’s Bambie Thug who did her (sorry ‘their’) best to tyrannise Eden Golan and whip us as much anti-Israel feeling as possible.
For those of us who have been disgusted by the bulling inflicted upon Eden as much as we have the regular chants of ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘Globalise the Intifada’ it was incredibly heartening to be part of a small pushback. If you watch the BBC (which still doesn’t correctly and consistently call Hamas a terrorist organisation), or any of the news channels or spend time on social media, those critical and cruel voices sound like the majority simply because they are the loudest in the public sphere.
One of the chapters in my book Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it, co-authored with Patrick Fagan, focuses on how to speak up against the cascading conformity of the crowd to cure yourself of “herd-poisoning”, as Aldous Huxley termed it. Ideas and sentiment are contagious – think of individual fish moving as a shoal. It feels lonely to swim counter to the shoal. The Eurovision public vote must mean everything to Israel and Eden Golan, but it also means a lot to those of who feel drowned out by the bullies – we can take comfort in the invisible but indisputable size of our crowd. We are the majority, not the minority.
Sometimes there are sides to pick – this is how a contest works after all – and it couldn’t be easier on this occasion to choose your side. Would you vote for, say, a narcissistic, self-described non-binary goblin, pretending to cast spells in a performance which resembled a Black Mass, or a woman singing her heart out with dignity despite the loud booing of the audience? Even Ireland’s public, home to Bambie Thug, gave Israel 10 points.
It may only have been the Eurovision Song Contest, but it felt like a vote for the face of our civilisational future.
Eden Golan was a heroine. She faced hatred with composure and dignity. Indeed, when she landed in Israel, people called out to her that she was a queen. As Israel wages a war against terrorists for nothing less than existential survival, the ordinary folk of Europe gave Queen Eden the win she deserved and the win we all needed. Encore!
This article was first published on Laura’s Substack page the Free Mind. Subscribe here.
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