Celebrated musicians including Massive Attack, Kneecap, Brian Eno, Sigur Rós, Nadine Shah, and many more have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest in protest of Israel’s participation.
Campaign groups No Music For Genocide and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel are calling for a boycott of this year’s highly divisive Eurovision Song Contest.
More than 1,000 artists, including Massive Attack, Kneecap, Brian Eno, Sigur Rós, Nadine Shah, Mogwai and Hot Chip, have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Eurovision 2026 in protest of Israel’s participation.
The letter calls upon the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to ban KAN – the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation – from the upcoming contest.
“For the third consecutive year,” the letter states, Israel will be “celebrated onstage despite its ongoing genocide in Gaza, while Russia remains banned for its illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
“We refuse to be silent when Israel’s genocidal violence soundtracks and silences Palestinian lives,” the letter reads. “When children in Israeli prisons endure beatings for humming a tune. When all that’s left of nearly every stage, studio, bookshop and university in Gaza is piles of rubble, under which slaughtered bodies still await recovery and proper burial.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for No Music For Genocide said: “People of conscience around the globe are fighting complicity in every industry for a free Palestine and a freer world. While many of us in the industry make light of Eurovision or doubt our own power as cultural producers, genocidal Israel’s leaders speak openly about the contest’s geopolitical value.”
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Music shouldn’t be the soundtrack of genocide
Agree, but you know… since Moroccan Oil (a nazi firm) is sponsoring the festival, it’s all good. Because money.
Meanwhile, Russia can’t participate (and rightfully so) because they invaded Ucraine. I guess they didn’t have a big enough sponsor to make their war as acceptable as the genocide in Gaza from the nazis.
Its weird to think about that.
Boycotting russia plunged Europe into huge difficulties, energy crisis and whatnot… and everyone, including (most of) the politicians accepted it with not much fuss.
What would boycotting israel do? Some weapons manufacturers couldn’t make a couple of millions? Just sell the stuff to Ukraine with EU backed loans.
I don’t get whats the hold up.
Europeans being murdered is an atrocity that cannot be tolerated. Brown people murdered out of our sight falls somewhere between meh and good-riddance depending on how bigoted you are.
Who are also mostly Muslim with great real estate they want to build resorts on.
Yeah it probably really is that simple.
I’d add, on top of all that, another important thing: Ucraine has resources, but those poor souls on Gaza? They barely have enough to survive. The assholes on the top think about it in monetary terms: has Gaza anything that we can use? Or are they just poor brown people?
There’s a lot of surveillance tech and a sh*tload of intel coming from Israel to the EU (and the US)
the value of that intel is questionable at best, but all the world’s oligarchs are addicted to assuming it may as well be true
Europe is an US colony, the current european ruling class has been shaped in decades of cold war to be aligned and part of the US empire.
Difficulties and crisis are bad for people, not for the politicians who use these to get even more power.
You’re a US colony.
Can Kid Rock please be the soundtrack of genocide?
We can get rid of both then.
musicians - the oligarchs of, performative virtue signalling, just in time as usual to have less than no effect