[1] Feel free to mentally replace similar with any other word that you think more accurately compares the two scenarios.
https://www.thefire.org/news/combat-anti-semitism-house-bill...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/1/us-house-passes-cont...
Germany accounted for 30% of Israel's arms imports between 2019 and 2023. In 2023 it accounted for 47% of Israel's total imports of conventional arms.
Between October 2023 and May 2025, Germany greenlighted the delivery of weapons and military equipment worth €485m to Israel
They since stopped the export of weaponry 'used in gaza' but it's naive in the extreme to accept assurances from the incumbent Israeli government to the contrary.
https://news.sky.com/story/germany-is-one-of-israels-stronge...
N.B. Israel continues to illegally carry weapons through Irish airspace, and kindly refers our government agency to El Al's Legal department on inquiry.
https://www.ontheditch.com/israels-national-airline-departme...
Because that's not the reason (Israel primarily imports weaponry and munitions from the US and India [0]).
The issue is the other way around. A significant portion of Germany's ground AD and defensive systems are sourced from Israel- most notably the Arrow 3 missile shield [1] deal that recently went through. Germany is heavily dependent on Israeli cybersecurity companies as well [2]. Germany is also subsidizing Arrow 3 sales to Ukraine [3].
Protecting your nations citizens always trumps morality, and in Germany's case, it's become even more critical after what happened in Poland this week.
[0] - https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs17/import/isr/show...
[1] - https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/06/09/israel-...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-s...
[3] - https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/israel-sells-missiles-to-ge...
Ireland basically has no army, and is entirely dependent on the UK for it's defense. As such, their politicans are free to say whatever (as long as it is not against the UK) because it's not going to come back and bite them in the behind. That said, that's now changing as the UK is trying to renegotiate the deal [0][1]
[0] - https://www.thejournal.ie/british-ireland-defence-agreement-...
[1] - https://www.irishpost.com/news/britain-and-ireland-to-renew-...
The Irish position should not be underestimated. It tends to be a bellweather for what others will align with in the future. Ireland tends to use it's soft power very effectively at the global table.
I would say that Israel is historically worried about the fact that his enemies want it to make it disappear. There are many things to criticize from them but this is the basic premise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2025/israel...
Such groups are so strong in Germany that Hitler used them to strenghten the power of his discourse.
Recognizing Israel / the Jews are the ones now doing Genocide would *in the sight of the extremist groups* prove their belief that Hitler was right / the Jews are the devil. (I repeat, in their regard, not mine)
Therefore, my opinion is that the official stance in Germany must be "historical responsability" mainly not for the sake of the Jews, but for the stability of the society.
I apologize for basically repeating myself. I just wanted to refer to the conspiracy theories you mentioned because calling them that is, ironically, constructive.
All countries are equal but some counties are more equal than others?
Being in Europe is not one of them - Israel is not in Europe, nor a few others, and Australia is literally as far away as you can get from Europe.
India, China, and Brazil are associate members too so they could all take part, potentially.
So, NBC etc. in the US are Public Service Broadcasters, whereas a local not-for-profit that has laid their own coax in your city is not a PSB.
In the UK ITV is a PSB, as well as the BBC (which you probably think of) and Channel 4 (which is owned by the state) but if your local school media team uploads local affairs videos to Youtube that's not a PSB.
The idea is there's finite radio bandwidth, the government has decided it gets to decide who uses that bandwidth and how, and so a PSB is an entity which got licensed to use some of that finite space to do something approved. Government policies might require or forbid certain programming, for example maybe you can't advertise cigarettes or you can't swear, but you must have a news show every weekday evening.
The EBU exists because of this same bandwidth issue. Radio doesn't care about politics, so even if adjacent country A and country B hate each other and have closed their borders, the radio waves from A propagate to B and vice versa. So radio "regions" exist which try to duck the politics as much as possible to focus on practicalities. That they don't fully duck politics is how we end up with Israel in Europe but not its immediate neighbours...
The insinuation being clear that Jewish diaspora were encouraged to vote heavily.
I'm not defending Ireland's performance but Israel's was objectively mediocre too. Eurovision voting is historically biased but it was weird last year.
That's almost always the case. And both groups were agreed that Ireland wasn't very good :P
> The insinuation being clear that Jewish diaspora were encouraged to vote heavily.
Did you just complain that people voted? Seriously?
No, several national broadcasters did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Europe_(Father_Ted)
European left isn't giving any path to Israel to get respect, they will attack Israel no matter what they do.
> there being no real story.
Ok, dude. I cannot educate you if you actively refuse to follow the news.
No real story like shooting an unarmed civilian, waiting for relatives to come to recover the body, then shooting them too?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-famil...
Nobody with half a brain conflates Israel's government with Judaism or with the Israeli people, ... but Israel's intelligence services have for a long time had the tactic to influence people to conflate them so as to be able to deflect criticism against its state as being anti-semitism — and they have been quite successful at that.
Similarly, antisemitic groups have taken advantage of the worldwide movement against what Israel is doing in Gaza and sometimes managed to insert themselves and their message among legitimate protests. For instance, this summer an MP in my country had retweeted an image containing symbolism that she didn't understand — which caused her party to (over)react and exclude her.
I am sure that there is a lot of misleading propaganda going left and right within Israel as well.
It is important to be careful and identify things for what they are.
By the looks of it, besides Ireland (in OP), Iceland ( https://www.ruv.is/english/2025-09-09-iceland-may-not-take-p... ) and Spain ( https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2025/09/11/spain-thr... ) have also stated their intention to boycott.
Luckily spaniards are better than this and Israel took the popular vote in Eurovision and is generally esteemed and respected by decent spaniards
https://wiwibloggs.com/2025/05/23/eurovision-director-martin...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/may/21/eurovis...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/eurovision/...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/06/05/eurovision-fac...
We just went to the website and swiped the credit card for Israel.
Just because activists say a thing doesn't make it true. You should make more objective factual claims instead of ambiguously defined or made up ones.
But sure all of them are wrong and you are right.
But many Israel supporters live in a reality distortion field where they're eternal victims and therefore can do no wrong. No amount of well documented war crimes or obvious lies from the Israeli government will make a dent, because Palestinian lives have exactly zero value to them.
6.1.1 DIRECT ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS OR INDISCRIMINATE ATTACKS It lists 15 cases of air strikes which it uses to support its claim of killing/harming members of a group which is part of the definition of genocide. However, all/nearly all of them say "Amnesty International did not find any evidence of a military objective.". So it seems possible Amnesty just doesn't know the secret military information and Israel didn't disclose it to them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Do you believe there can't possibly have been any military objectives that make those air strikes legitimate?
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/
Leaving aside, of course, the fact that attacking a civilian hospital, even one that has some military targets in it (say wounded combatants), would also certainly mean killing or injuring many invalid targets, and at that point you should really provide not just evidence of a military target but also evidence that you couldn't attack the target in any other way and that the target is valuable enough to justify the deaths of innocent people.
Which Israel has not done, and really, can't do. Because there really aren't many targets worth bombing a hospital for.
We don't know for sure that Hind Rajab wasn't planning attacks when she was supposed to be learning the alphabet either.
Maybe she was leading a Hamas cell with a crayon, but the intelligence is too crucial to share!
This style of argument is absurd.
Over 65000 people were killed by the Israeli "Defense" Forces in Gaza since October 7th. 31% of them were children.
When “roughly half” of Gaza’s population “are under the age of 18,” your statistic actually describes discretion [1]. As for total kills, the data I’ve seen on CCRs put the IDF’s actions in the precedents range of guerrilla wars.
The way the IDF is conducting the war is, unfortunately, normal. What is not normal is the restriction of food, detention conditions and Netanyahu joining the Russia/China/Turkey club (along with Trump) on throwing out international law.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/18/1206897328/half-of-gazas-popu...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1233395830/ireland-pro-palest...
P.S. Last year Ireland gave top score to Israel. So by leaving the competition, their elites will not be so embarrassed that the population has a completely different opinion. So possibly the Irish people are not the ruling elites, and it's just the politicians that are nasty ( as usual)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clwpz157v1go
The rest is just Zionist alternate-reality ranting, but I'll sign-off by pointing out that our Minister for Justice and Equality and Minister for Defence from 2011 to 2014 is Jewish and worked in Kibbutz' in Israel during his teens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shatter
Chaim Herzog, sixth president of Israel from 1983 to 1993, was born in Belfast and educated in Dublin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Herzog
Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, his father and a fluent Irish speaker, was the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, 1921 to 1936. From 1936 until his death in 1959, he was Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine, and subsequently Israel after its creation in 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_HaLevi_Herzog
And finally the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses - Leopold Bloom - is Jewish, in what is effectively our national narrative.
Wait till you find out about the American stance to Jewish refugees during World War 2.
Why, why is it essential?
E.g this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ap-reporting-calls-into... was suppressed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161654 where it's obvious Israel are bombing hospitals and killing journalists.
I, for one, am interested in the technology Israel are using to commit genocide, and their connection with giants like Microsoft and Palantir, from the technical part, so I think the article is pretty relevant for HN.
Would be great if a HN mod explains their decision under flagging such an article so we, the HN community, understand the reasoning of a genocide apologizer. It's fascinating from a psychology perspective how "never again" means "again, this time we are doing it to others", so I think it's also relevant for HN.
Of course, the mods operate with quiet persistence, determined to erase all trace of Israeli war crimes, the same way Israel works hard to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
Basically it boils down to he thinks we have talked about it enough and it annoys him how upset people are about it. And ultimately he considers admiring the technology used in war machines (and terrorism like the pager attack) to be clearly within the editorial remit of HN but that discussing their effects on the people they are used on is borderline so they police it more vigorously.
throw8924389•1h ago
It's antisemitism, plain and simple.
For instance, nobody would ban a US pop star from an international event just because many disagree with the current policies of the US government.
Compare to the countless global conflicts we have seen in the last decades, including the reactions and overreactions and including wars and military force and ask yourself, why Israel is singled out and moreover why individual jews that are living abroad are singled out.