Beauty pageants are at best a useless diversion and at worst a craven objectification of women.
As usual, the frivolity associated with this year's edition of the Miss Universe show reached an apex of mirth when the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation showed a taped version of the pageant on Saturday evening. Any and all references to Miss Israel were crudely extracted, even when she was selected as one of the 10 finalists. LBC and its competitors have a right to waste their resources on pretending that Israel and Israelis do not exist. And, as private companies, they even have the right to embarrass the entire country by producing a product that makes others think we are stuck in the Dark Ages. But consider the logic of eliminating Israeli athletes, beauty queens, singers, etc. from programming in a market where news coverage is saturated with coverage of Israeli officialdom.