This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
Luxembourg is facing calls to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest because Israel is participating. This is not only misguided, it is insulting to the artists who have worked tirelessly to represent Luxembourg on the European stage. These singers are not politicians, nor are they diplomats.
They are musicians: people whose craft is meant to unite, not divide. Punishing them for the actions of (someone else’s) government is as absurd as banning a baker from selling bread because you dislike the wheat for another country’s foreign policy.
Eurovision was never designed to be a geopolitical battlefield. Its purpose is simple: to bring people together through music in a world already drowning in so much hate and division. If we start turning it into a proxy war, we lose the very essence of what makes it special.
And let’s talk about the selective outrage. Those calling for boycotts against Israel are strangely silent when Turkey participates, despite the fact that opposition activists, politicians, and journalists are routinely imprisoned by the hundreds there.
No protests when Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh and displaced hundreds of thousands overnight. No outrage when regimes with far worse human rights records take the stage.
Apparently, the moral compass only starts spinning when Israel is involved. That’s textbook antisemitism dressed up as virtue.
This isn’t just about Eurovision. Luxembourg has already seen how boycott campaigns can distort public life. Cactus, the country’s largest supermarket chain, announced it would stop selling Israeli fruits and vegetables after pressure from pro-Palestinian groups.
The decision wasn’t about economics: Israeli produce is high quality and accounted for a marginal share of sales. It was about avoiding “embarrassment” from activists staging demonstrations at store entrances. In other words, intimidation worked. So it did in the case of Grosbusch.
That’s a slippery slope. When businesses or cultural institutions cave to selective outrage, they allow biased views to dictate what the rest of society can buy, watch, or enjoy. It’s not solidarity, it’s coercion. And it risks normalizing antisemitic double standards that punish Israelis uniquely while ignoring actual abuses elsewhere. Luxembourg should not go down this road.
And here’s the kicker: if these boycotters were truly consistent, they wouldn’t stop at fruits, vegetables, or ballads. They would also have to give up their smartphones, laptops, medical devices, and life-saving treatments, because Israeli technology is embedded in all of them.
From microchips powering cellphones, to medical innovations like insulin pumps and defibrillators, Israel’s contributions are everywhere. Why stop at music and food?
So unless the boycott crowd is ready to toss their iPhones in the river, refuse emergency medical care, and live without modern tech, their outrage is nothing more than selective grandstanding.
They want the symbolism of a boycott without the inconvenience of actually living by their own principles. This is hypocrisy at scale.
Eurovision is not a parliament. It is not a UN summit. It is a stage where artists (often critical of their own governments) sing, perform, and share their voices with the world. To silence them because of selective outrage is not justice.
Luxembourg should sing. Loudly. Proudly. And remind Europe that music is meant to build bridges, not walls.
