Earlier this month, Israel treated the Gaza Strip to a quick military assault that killed nearly thirty Palestinians, among them two infants and two pregnant women. Four Israelis were also killed by rocket fire from Gaza — an unusually high casualty count, proportionally speaking, for Israel, whose recent track record also includes wiping out 2,251 people in Gaza in fifty days.

As usual, Western media outlets were quick to blame the Palestinians, while valiantly upholding the Israeli monopoly over the right to retaliation and self-defense — which, it bears mentioning, is kind of like saying the car wheel was defending itself against the crushed armadillo.

According to the Daily Beast, the upshot of the bloody showdown was as follows: “Hamas Started a War Over Eurovision, the Song Contest That Gave Us ABBA.” We are left to understand that the occasional Palestinian decision to fire generally ineffective rockets has nothing to do with being under continuous Israeli attack but rather with strategic objectives like wrecking Eurovision, the annual gaudy affair that launched the Swedish pop group in 1974 and that is currently underway in this year’s host city: Tel Aviv.