Yes, I know sometimes it seems as though my job here at AFoE is to lower the high-minded tone with discussion of inanities, but there’s another interesting story about the Eurovision Song Contest today, namely that Lebanon - who were intending to make their first entry into the competition this year - have now withdrawn from it after being told by the EBU that they would not be allowed to avoid showing the Israeli entry. This report on the esctoday site gives more details, including some background of other problems with Arab countries around Israel’s entries over the years. For now, you can also see the gap between Latvia and Lithuania on the list of particpants on the official Eurovision site.
Obviously, there are far more important things going on in Lebanon right now, but it’s another interesting story to add to the file of the intersections between politics and culture at the Eurovision.
Feed: A Fistful of Euros
March 19th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
Y’r wrryng bt lwrng th tn f blg f mmtr wnkrs wh cnsr psts?
Fr ths wh ht pzzls, th mssng lttrs r:
flly xpct vn ths vwls t dssppr t.
March 23rd, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Thanks, Nick - I think posts like that are great. We all too often ignore the intersection of politics and culture, and here’s another great example of it. It’s interesting how ‘peripheral’ things often provide the best insight into the identity of a coutnry.