Your foolish vote urgently needs an audit

let's (not) talk about taboos

Your foolish vote urgently needs an audit

The camp and kitsch music competition called the Eurovision Song Contest has caused a political and media storm in Europe. The call for an audit regarding the unwanted public votes for Israel (singer Yuval Raphael received the highest score of 12 points from both the Spanish and Belgian audiences ( and from the UK, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Portugal and Luxemburg, ) despite media calls to exclude Israel from the competition as punishment for the bombings of Hamas’s Gaza, which still refuses to release (the bodies of) the remaining hostages and uses Gaza’s Palestinian civilian population as human shields) was as loud in my new homeland, Spain, as in my native Belgium. Both TV broadcasters, VRT (Belgium) and RTVE (Spain), requested an audit from the organizer, EBU, regarding the viewers’ televoting. Because how could it be that the public didn’t obediently follow the carefully curated opinion of the mainstream media like tame sheep? “Fortunately,” there was still the jury of the inevitable “experts” who dutifully did what was expected of them, ensuring Israel couldn’t win the competition. According to a commentator in the Belgian so-called quality newspaper De Standaard, this narrowly avoided a “disgrace.”