SARAH VINE: My despair at Greta Thunberg and the insanity of her army of hate pixies protesting against silly, kitsch Eurovision

The older I get, the more I think that humans, as a species, are getting crazier and crazier. If not all, yes many.

Take, for example, the Eurovision hysteria. The annual event is a silly, kitsch and largely irrelevant music competition (I use the term ‘music’ loosely) in which embarrassing regional acts perform pale approximations of suitable pop songs against a backdrop of gleeful xenophobia.

Occasionally a decent act slips through (Abba, Maneskin, Domenico Modugno), but mostly it’s over-the-top pyrotechnics and silly costumes.

In the case of the British entry, he’s invariably a virtue-signalling fool in a torn T-shirt who thinks that simulating sex with crotch-grabbing dancers dressed as rent boys and pontificating about how much he hates the British flag will make up for the lack of talent. vocal.

It’s not like that, but who cares. It’s just a bit of a laugh.

Or it was until Greta Thunberg and her army of hate goblins showed up and focused on something else. Wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, the 21-year-old Swede explained in her characteristically prudish tone: “Young people are leading the way and showing the world how we should react to this.”

If only that were the case.

Unfortunately, I am no longer a young person, but if I were I would like to think that my reaction – and that of my peers – to the brutal rape, murder and mutilation of hundreds of young people at the Nova music festival last October 7 by a group of Hamas terrorists financed by the totalitarian dictatorship of Iran that imprisons, tortures and murders girls like me, it would be absolute solidarity with those victims.

Instead, at Eurovision and elsewhere, there is sympathy for the supporters of these terrorists and their vile actions, blind hatred towards Israel for daring to defend itself and its citizens, and an attempt to mobilize thousands more to harass and intimidate the entrance of Israel, Eden. Golan, whose only crime (aside from his horrible fake nails) is his nationality.

A 20-year-old man was booed for performing a song about survival in the face of suffering.

She was forced to lock herself in her hotel room for fear of being attacked. She has been treated as if she is responsible for decades of conflict in the Middle East.

I always thought Thunberg was a bit weird, but I didn’t realize that she was also unpleasant.

But the madness doesn’t end there. A Brighton-based group calling itself “Queers for Palestine” (they know, don’t they, what happens to gays in places ruled by hardline Islamic regimes like Iran?) posted online the contact numbers for venues planning to host Eurovision nights, urging people to tell them to “reconsider” because the organizers were “complicit in genocide” by allowing Israel to participate.

Inevitably, the BBC reported this on Newsnight alongside an interview with a drag queen called ‘Crystal’ by presenter Kirsty Wark (poor woman – decades of experience as a respected broadcaster and this is what we’ve come to).

Through thick mauve makeup and false eyelashes, Crystal said: “I was going to host my own screening event, with 800 people screaming and cheering, but I decided to join the boycott because of the inclusion of Israel.”

I’m sorry Crystal’s party was ruined, but seriously, is this how far we’ve fallen? That the cancellation of a party in north London is worthy of a spot on Newsnight?

And isn’t it ironic that a drag queen would complain about the inclusion of Israel, a nation where LGBT culture flourishes like almost no other, and which was the first country in Eurovision history to feature an openly trans contestant (the fabulous Dana International in 1998) – did any of these people think of it? Or are they just too thick to see? Young women like Israeli Eurovision contestant Eden Golan are not enemies of the Palestinian people.

That enemy is Hamas and the terrorist network that oppresses Palestinian civilians, builds a network of tunnels under their homes and hospitals, fills their heads with hatred towards Jews and fuels this endless and brutal conflict with their barbaric actions.

For the record, I didn’t think much of Golan’s song (although I did like her dress). It was a second-rate, sub-Céline Dion ballad, with abysmal choreography. But I defend her right to perform for the simple fact that I believe in a world where young girls with silly nails can dance and sing as much as they want without being afraid.

And I defend it because the fact that so many young people around the world have been trying to stop it represents a kind of disorder that I will never, as long as I live, understand.

• Hugh Grant isn’t a very nice human being, so I don’t agree with him, but on the subject of the new iPad ad, he’s right. He describes the ad, which shows creative objects, including musical instruments and books, crushed by a press before an iPad appears in their place as “the destruction of the human experience.” In other words, all the painters, artists, musicians and writers in history were reduced, literally, to ghosts in a machine to feed the coffers of Silicon Valley.

• A friend sent me a photo of his local hipster bakery with about 40 people lining up to buy sourdough. ‘How crazy! It will take about an hour to serve it,” he said. There is a lunch place near me that is also packed on the weekends. The food is good but you have to wait 30 minutes to get a small table and it costs about £50 a head. I can make two eggs with sourdough, bacon and avocado for around £1.50, without the garnish of other people’s screaming children.

That Yo You can see it in Meghan’s speech.

Taking Nigeria by storm, the Duchess of Sussex told a group of children an anecdote about her two-year-old daughter Lilibet. ‘She looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I see myself in you.’ When I look around this room, I see myself in all of you too.’ What an extraordinary thing to say. I have known some two-year-olds in my time, some quite brilliant, but none offered as useful an opportunity for a fragment as Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor.

A vicar armed with a chisel attempts to break the protective glass of the Magna Carta as part of a Just Stop Oil protest. A vicar. The Church of England really is a joke.

Control the lycra oafs

A cyclist traveling at speeds approaching 30mph in a park with a 20mph limit avoided conviction despite a crash that killed an 81-year-old woman. As a cyclist, he sometimes nearly collided with distracted pedestrians. But with rheumatic knees and an old touring bike, there is a limit to the damage I can cause. But lately I’m afraid of Lycra yahoos on high-tech bikes who cut me up and curse my slowness. Worse are those who ride electric bicycles and scooters. Surely it’s time for the rules to be reviewed?

Not surprisingly, researchers have found that women who take time off from social media experience a marked improvement in their self-esteem. It fosters an ideal of perfection that is completely unrealistic. We are not only encouraged to judge ourselves by the standards of others, but to obsess over our own appearance and become slaves to the camera. Luckily, I’m part of that last generation that grew up without the damn thing. We had no idea how terrible we were most of the time, but we lived much happier lives.

So that’s conviction politics!

Fascinating. A new poll reveals that a guilty verdict for Donald Trump in his Stormy Daniels “hush money” trial would drive votes for him in certain key states. This could lead to the extraordinary situation of a president with a criminal conviction having to grant himself a pardon. Not even Silvio Berlusconi could have dreamed of something so sordid.