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In a rather twisted way, it’s altogether fitting and proper that the Eurovision Song Contest should have ended up being held this year – when the big story surrounding the competition is all about Jew-hatred and support for jihadist terrorism – in Malmö, Sweden. In all of Europe, after all, no country is more infamous for its overwhelming level of Muslim immigration – and hence for its high incidence of Muslim-on-infidel rape and other jihadist transgressions – than Sweden, and in all of Sweden, no city is more infamous for the extent of its Islamization than Malmö.

It’s no surprise, then, that an Israeli Jewish reporter, Zeev Avrahami, who traveled to Sweden’s third-largest city not to cover a war but to report for Ynet News on the continent’s biggest and most vapid annual cultural event, found himself being beaten up the other day by a viciously anti-Semitic mob. Avrahami has said that when he disembarked from a train in Malmö after the brief journey from Copenhagen across the narrow strait called the Øresund, the main railroad station “resembled Jenin” on the West Bank. “Flags were unfurled, elders with determination, and children in festive attire, stickers, and drums. Locals stood with placards mounted on wooden poles, bearing the inscription on both sides: ‘Boycott Israel.’ They led the crowds to the demonstration, like seasoned tour guides. The Swedes were organized.”

When Avrahami began taking pictures of this gruesome scene with his phone, “a woman around 60, dressed in a keffiyeh-patterned dress, her head covered with a Palestinian scarf, and her mouth masked with a Palestinian mask, jumped on me and demanded I stop photographing.” He pointed out that Sweden is a democracy. She repeated her demand and was joined by friends who shared her view. A policeman assured Avrahami that he did indeed have a right to take photos, but the woman, along with a growing group of allies, began taking Avrahami’s picture and chanting “songs of hatred for Israel and ardor for Palestine.” The woman disappeared, only to return a few moments later with “seven or eight young Muslims” who “demanded to see documents and prove that I wasn’t Jewish or Israeli.” When Avrahami assured them that he was both, he was hit on the head with “a blunt object” and fell to the ground. Swedish police observed it all, but did nothing.

The reason why a song competition was being targeted by anti-Semites is that one of the participants in the contest, 20-year-old Eden Golan, was representing Israel. This year, as has become the usual practice, there was a semi-final on Tuesday of last week, a second semi-final on Thursday, and, on Saturday, the final competition featuring all the winners of the two semi-finals. Golan was scheduled to sing on Thursday. At a rehearsal on Wednesday, she was reportedly booed loudly both before and after her performance. Veteran Eurovision experts (imagine having that as a job description!) took it for granted that Golan would be voted out of the competition prontissimo.

Among these experts was Jostein Pedersen, who pointed out that when Ukraine won Eurovision in 2022, its victory was widely explained as an expression of sympathy for a country that had just been invaded by Russia. Last October, of course, Hamas invaded Israel, but many of the same people who cheer Ukraine as a plucky victim of an unjust military attack have managed to scrub October 7 from their memories and instead see Israel as committing anti-Palestinian genocide. Among them are young geniuses like 19-year-old Swedish activist Christofer Kibbon, who told the Guardian late last week that “Israel is using the ESC [Eurovision Song Contest] to ‘pink-wash’ themselves” – that idiotic term, popularized by American lesbian writer Sarah Schulman, which defines Israel’s acceptance of homosexuality as a cynical ploy to distract from its alleged cruelty to Muslims (and which makes possible such preposterous phenomena as Queers for Palestine).

Kibbon was one of tens of thousands of people who took to the streets of Malmö to protest Israel’s involvement in this year’s Eurovision. Israel has competed at Eurovision no fewer than forty-six times (no, it’s not located in Europe, of course, but the countries in its own neighborhood, as it happens, aren’t big either on song contests or on Jews), and its inclusion has been criticized before, especially by Nordic countries. But this time around the controversy is through the roof. After October 7, there were calls from all over Europe – again, especially from the Nordic countries – for Israel to be ejected from the club. Eurovision honchos, to their credit, stood firm. Nonetheless, Golan, unlike other Eurovision performers, has had to spend her week in Malmö surrounded by police guards. “When she isn’t onstage,” reported the Norwegian newspaper VG, “she’s mostly isolated in her hotel room for security reasons.” (According to the Daily Mail, in fact, Israeli security officials ordered Golan not to leave her hotel room.) 

VG’s reporter assumed, as did Pedersen and the other “experts,” that Golan and her song “Hurricane” would go down to defeat in the semi-final. But they were proved wrong – quite dramatically so. When Golan stepped onstage at Thursday’s semi-final, during which tens of thousands pro-Hamas protesters took to the streets of Malmö to decry her participation, she was reportedly booed lustily by the live audience – although to me, watching the video online the next day, the jeers seemed like nothing in comparison to the cheers. At the end of the show, of the sixteen semi-finalists, Israel was one of the ten countries that received enough votes to move on to the finals. Although the semi-finalists are announced in no particular order and the actual vote counts are kept secret, Eurovision officials in Italy accidentally released the purported results of that country’s voting, which appeared to indicate that Golan had garnered the support of no fewer than 39% of Italian viewers who took the trouble to cast a vote.

The history of Golan and “Hurricane”’s long and winding road to Malmö is a curious one. Eurovision started out, back in 1956, as a song contest. The music and lyrics were paramount; the singers were of secondary importance. This has changed drastically over the years. Golan became Israel’s representative as the result of a series of auditions over a period of months, during which she sang, on the TV show Hakokhav Haba no fewer than a dozen different tunes; after she was tapped to go to Malmö, the committee tasked with picking the song for her to sing went with a number called “October Rain,” which metaphorically referenced Hamas’s attacks on October 7. Yet both “October Rain” and another song – this one co-written by Golan – were rejected by the European Broadcasting Union as being too “political.” (An excerpt from “October Rain”’s original lyrics: “Someone stole the moon tonight / Took my light / Everything is black and white / Who’s the fool who told you / Boys don’t cry.”) It took two rewrites for “October Rain,” now entitled “Hurricane,” to be accepted by the EBU.

I think it’s fair to say that Eurovision’s core audience of silly teenage girls and campy gay men tilts left – and therefore presumably anti-Israel and pro-Hamas. So how is it that Golan did so well in the semi-final? Frøy Gudbrandsen, the political editor of VG, argued that it would be wrong to suggest that Golan’s success represented a thumbs-up for the IDF’s siege of Gaza. Perhaps, however, she maintained, it reflected a “strong sympathy with the Israeli population” that could very easily coexist with opposition to the IDF’s actions.  Gudbrandsen further noted that “it’s easy to feel sympathy for a young performer who has encountered massive rage…in a city where anti-Semitism is a big problem.” Full points to Gudbrandsen for being honest about Malmö being a hub of Jew-hatred. But Gudbrandsen also said this: the support for Golan may well indicate that ordinary Europeans’ sympathy for Israel is much higher than the noisy pro-Palestinian demonstrations would have you believe.

I would like to think that this is true, and I suspect it is. Western Europeans, especially those living in the Nordic countries, are under immense pressure from their political, media, and social elites to oppose Israel. Pro-Israeli voices face massive abuse and scorn. Could it be that many people, even in the Nordic countries, who can’t admit to a telephone pollster that they support Israel welcomed the opportunity to vote anonymously for Golan? It certainly seems worth pondering that while one in five Norwegians told VG pollsters that “they would boycott Eurovision because of Israel’s participation,” the number of Norwegians watching the second semi-final peaked during Golan’s segment and that of Norway’s entrant, Gåte (Mystery), who happened to follow her.

Naturally, Golan’s success – and especially that staggering 39% figure from Italy – alarmed many. Could Golan actually come out #1 on Saturday evening? Norwegian state television (NRK) reporter Linda Marie Vedeler wrote on Friday that fellow journalists she’d spoken to at Eurovision believed that if Israel won, Eurovision would be “destroyed.” By Saturday, the Nordic press in particular seemed to be in a state of utter hysteria, with one Anders Tangen (yet another a Eurovision “expert”) saying that “total chaos” had erupted behind the scenes, with several countries, including the UK and Ireland, threatening to withdraw from the contest. Alessandra Mele, who represented Norway in last year’s competition and who was scheduled to announce Norway’s vote in the closing segment of Saturday’s program, pulled out. In a separate controversy, Eurovision officials removed from Saturday’s lineup the Dutch entrant, Joost Klein, who was accused of assaulting a camerawoman. But the Klein story, which in any other year would have been big news, was entirely overshadowed by the horrific prospect of Israel actually winning Eurovision. NRK reported on Saturday afternoon that a “crisis meeting” about the question had taken place.

Given all this drama, Saturday’s show went off, for the most part, pretty much as usual. It opened with the performers taking the stage one by one, waving their national flags. There were cheers for all of them – including Golan. None of the participating countries had pulled out. As always, the show felt interminable. The songs, typically, were all awful, although some were more awful than others. When it was Golan’s turn to sing, she was greeted by cheers and was cheered almost entirely throughout her song. If you hadn’t known that “Hurricane” had begun as a tribute to the victims of October 7, you’d never have guessed it from the final lyrics; it came off like a thoroughly typical Eurovision song. (Other highlights: Ireland was represented by a self-identified “non-binary” singer; as a special treat, ABBA sang “Waterloo,” which this year celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Eurovision victory.)

When it came time to count the votes – half of them from national juries, the other half from viewers who registered their choices by phone, text, or online app – the audience booed ESC executive supervisor Martin Österdahl (presumably for his refusal to kick Israel off the show), and also booed the woman who, appearing by satellite from Jerusalem, announced Israel’s jury vote. The jury put Israel in 12th place out of 25 – in other words, pretty much smack in the middle. The vote by TV viewers, however, was something else again. They put Israel second only to Croatia, giving it a number of “televotes” – 323 – that dwarfed the tallies of most of the other countries, only four of which received over 200 votes and only six of which exceeded 100 votes. (Croatia’s public vote was 337, only 14 more than Israel’s.) In fact, TV viewers in 15 countries, including Germany, Britain, France, and Spain, put Israel at #1, with only nine countries’ viewers going for Croatia, seven for Ukraine, and only one apiece for seven other entrants.

Indeed, TV viewers in almost every Western European country put Israel in first, second, or third place – the sole exception being the notoriously anti-Semitic kingdom of Norway, whose voters put Golan in seventh place. (Norway’s jury actually put Golan in third place, for which it was seriously savaged in the Norwegian media.) NRK’s host rightly called Israel’s haul a “dizzying” sum – it lifted Golan, in the combined tally, up to fifth place in the contest – and it could scarcely be interpreted in any other way than as reflecting an extraordinary level of sympathy for Israel among European TV viewers. Perhaps this really shouldn’t have been a surprise: Europeans tune into Eurovision not only because they’re crazy about music (even though, in this case, it’s almost all lousy music) but also because they want to spend a few hours watching something fun and silly and free-spirited. And by this point most Europeans are very well aware that Islam simply isn’t interested in music – or, for that matter, in fun, or silliness, or freedom.