With ever-growing calls to ban Israel from Eurovision, you might think that this is where the controversy quota around the world’s most popular song contest maxes out. But what if the most shocking Eurovision moment went under the radar of everyone’s attention, maybe exactly because it was designed to remain unnoticed? At the Arena Plus pre-show party in Basel, Switzerland, just before the biggest public Eurovision screening, the St. Jakob-Park audience was asked to – finance jihad. During the performance of Baby Lasagna, the most popular act of the evening, stadium visitors were instructed to secretly fund the Islamic struggle!
You struggle to believe that? See the newest Eurovision controversy for yourself!
Still haven’t noticed a thing? Watch again. And try not to blink. Exactly like in the subliminal messaging theory, the influence-striving idea appears as a flashing image, briefly, in the blink of an eye. Unless you were watching the footage frame by frame, you’d have missed it.
The subliminal cue to finance jihad in secret flashed three times during Baby Lasagna’s “Rim Tim Tagi Dim”
Just after the Croatian artist who topped the Eurovision 2024 public vote sang that “anxiety attacks”, the thing happened. Baby Lasagna band went into a full-on head-shaking “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” climax. Simultaneously, visuals ramped up into a rapid-fire frenzy, bombarding eye retinas of the unsuspecting euphoric crowd. No time for interpretation. Optic nerves carried them to their brains, for nesting.
It was a feel-good moment for 36,000 visitors at Joggeli stadium. They cheered and sang along, danced the iconic elbow pump move, and even recorded the entire performance with smartphones, for a repeated viewing at home, or sharing them online, like a “memory”.
One of the electric signals infiltrating the audience’s optic tracts delivered a chilling subliminal cue: “Fund the Islamic Struggle Without Leaving a Trace”. The subliminal message flashed three times during the song. It was embedded with an entire instruction on how to transfer bitcoins to the United States jihadis.
The crypto wallet isn’t fiction – it’s real, dates back to 2012, and has previously been flagged in investigations as a suspected stream for financing the terrorist organization Islamic State.
TL;DR: During Baby Lasagna’s Eurovision pre-show in Basel, Switzerland, subliminal visuals - including an old pro-jihad fundraising message - flashed onscreen to 36,000 unsuspecting spectators. Whether it was art, activism, propaganda, or just a deeply twisted joke, no one has claimed responsibility.
What is subliminal messaging?
Subliminal messaging is the use of stimuli – usually visual or auditory – delivered below the threshold of conscious perception, to influence thoughts, feelings, behavior, or decisions… Without the receiving individual even realizing it.
The information is flashed so briefly or hidden so subtly that our conscious mind doesn’t notice it. But the subconscious part of the mind might.
Subliminal messages typically show up in formats like:
- Single-frame images hidden in videos or film reels
- Words or images embedded in pictures, logos, or ads (hello, conspiracy theorists!)
- Low-volume audio buried under louder music or speech
Does that really work, though? Subliminal cues could have mild effects in priming (for instance, pre-exposing us to certain words might influence our social and intellectual performance, perception, or motivation). However, evidence doesn’t support that they could turn us into mind-controlled zombies.
Despite this, advertisers, artists, and propagandists have all experimented with this powerful idea.
The concept gained attention in 1957, when market researcher James Vicary claimed he flashed phrases like “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat popcorn” in a movie theater to boost sales. He later admitted to making it all up.
In the 1980s, accusations of subliminal messages in music (backmasking, or recording audio messages backward) led to moral panic. The US Christian fundamentalists believed Satan himself invaded rock music so he could infiltrate innocent minds. In response, they organized dramatic record-smashing rituals in churches, because nothing says salvation like burning vinyl.
Whether real or suspected, the history of subliminal messaging includes “The Exorcist” 1973 movie (director William Friedkin tried to upgrade our nightmares by inserting brief flashes of a white-faced demon), George W. Bush’s 2000 political campaign (while criticizing Democrats, the ad briefly flashed the word ‘RATS’), and a myriad of examples in Walt Disney’s work (from the alleged ‘666’ hidden in the company logo to the secret society Illuminati referenced in “DuckTales” series).
What really happened at Arena Plus?
Arena Plus in Basel was marketed as a “spectacular pre-show with international and national artists, ESC stars”.
On May 17th, 2025, while Eurovision artists were warming up in St. Jakobshalle, a much larger-capacity venue across the street had a spectacle of its own.
They say St. Jakob-Park stadium is one of THE places to visit in Basel on any given day. But that evening, the “top-class show program” featured Lochus Alphorn Quartett, Anna Rossinelli, Kate Ryan, Marko Purišić aka Baby Lasagna, Luca Hänni, DJ Antoine, and Marc Sway.
Later on, the audience would cheer and sing with Eurovision acts broadcast live on quadruple LED screens, and even have a Eurovision moment of their own, joining the SING!Basel choir in the largest ABBA sing-along. “Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war…”
It was a night to remember; six hours of entertainment, with over a third performed live on a gigantic stage cube (20 x 20 x 10 meters), smack in the middle of the football pitch.
The undisputed highlight of the indoor arena was an interval act of Baby Lasagna and Käärijä battle “Eurodab”, seamlessly blended into songs of “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” and “Cha Cha Cha”, the audience’s favorites from Eurovision editions when second places were not connected with televote manipulation allegations.
But before the Croatian Eurovision vice-champion would join forces with the Finnish one in front of the entire world, Arena Plus had a privileged round of decompress. “One more time for all the good times, Rim-tim-tagi-digi, dim-tim-tim…” echoed on Switzerland’s largest football stadium.
“Baby Lasagna made the stadium shake”, Basler Zeitung reported, describing the 36.000 fans as ‘intoxicated’.
After a thorough frame-by-frame analysis of the Arena Plus footage, we know that the Baby Lasagna band was not the only reason for the intoxication. A lot more slipped in through the wide-open eyes of the receptive audience that just came to experience some Eurovision fun.
Looking for more Eurovision entertainment? We found the song contest’s acts among the famous paintings in Kunstmuseum Basel. Check out these unexpected twins!
Glitches during Baby Lasagna’s set
Supported by the ecstatic arena fans, Baby Lasagna tore through “Biggie Boom Boom” and “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” with an expected dynamic flair. High-energy beats and the artist’s signature intensity brought the stadium to its feet, eyes locked on the massive central screens.
As the famous Croatian song surged into its final crescendo, something was off. The image flickered at a rate that would normally require an epileptic seizure warning. But one could hardly put a finger on any concrete source of discomfort. Everyone was too busy swallowing the most popular song of Eurovision 2024.
To the naked eye, it was just a flurry of red, green, and white flashes. But once you get to a machine more sophisticated than human eyesight, and slow down the footage, you start discovering visual injections that beg to be decoded. What did the author want to say?
Here are some of the glitches appearing during Baby Lasagna’s performance that I first managed to identify:
Glitch City (Pokémon)
One still exposed a glitched screen straight from the original Pokémon game (Blue version) in 1996. The Pokémon community often refers to this type of visual anomaly as Glitch City – it occurs due to errors in the role-playing game’s memory, often triggered by specific in-game actions and manipulations.
Virtual Boy logo (Nintendo)
Another visual that flashed before the Arena Plus audience’s eyes was the logo for the Nintendo Virtual Boy, an ill-fated red-and-black console released in 1995. This gaming system was designed to simulate 3D via a technique called parallax. Its display, viewed through an eyeshade, featured two monochrome red screens, where oscillating mirrors created a full image. The product flopped, but it left a legacy of eerie digital alienation.
JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)
One detected frame bursting beneath Baby Lasagna’s feet was a disorienting homepage for the wwwwwwwww.jodi.org project (the standard www prefix is exaggerated to 9 w’s). Digital pranksters and web art pioneers Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans created this scrambled design landscape using raw HTML. Since the mid-1990s, the duo has been turning the conventions of the internet upside down, exploring the beauty of computer malfunction and code manipulation, inserting glitches into iconic video games, and engaging in hacktivism – manipulating digital spaces to make us rethink online interactions.
Machine learning model training
Another freeze-frame showed a snapshot of a machine learning model mid-training. It’s tracking the progress of the training process, including loss, processing speed, etc. Most likely, it’s a text classification or natural language processing (NLP) task using fastText, the open-source library created by Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) lab. Someone, somewhere, was teaching machines how to read, predict, and respond.
MRI scan of the head
The next momentary flicker in Baby Lasagna’s act appeared to be a medical scan, an MRI or CT of a human head, taken on April 5th, 1999. Memory meets machine.
You got it by now… In a short timeframe of “Rim Tim Tagi Dim”’s intro, interlude, and post-chorus, we are flooded with a digital rebus of distorted blips, with artifacts, numbers, and visual noise. They all exist on the intersection of human and machine intelligence, practically exploring ways to break into the system we call memory – a process of storing past experiences so they could be used to influence future actions.
Subliminal Messages Hidden in Plain Sight – Somebody’s Watching You
Atop the Arena Plus cube-shaped structure – reminiscent of Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site in Mecca – flamethrowers shot bursts of fire in the air. Explosions synced with Baby Lasagna’s music. And then, a giant eye stared at the stadium. Well, stare is a generous term. Remember, each of these “interruptions” lasted exactly one frame! In standard video rate, that’s 1/30th of a second.
But pause it at just the right moment, and there it is: a close-up, pixelated black-and-white eye, rendered in a halftone effect. Much like the graphic pattern Eurovision uses for its branding, except the EBU turns dots into hearts.
You could interpret the unseen eye as just some pop art detail. Its dramatic gaze could invoke the surveillance culture of “Big Brother”.
The eye flicker file is available on Videezy video community, and online visual search delivers two known uses.
One accompanied the first physical release from Lightsurf Tapes, dedicated to providing physical memories in the form of CDs and cassette tapes.
The second appearance of this very eye occurs in something much more intense – at the start of an 8-minute video titled “Torn Land, Palestinians Story”, uploaded to YouTube by Khaled Hafez on October 28th, 2023, exactly three weeks after the Hamas attacks in Southern Israel. At the time of writing, the video had only 4 views.
Despite the nanoscopic reach, it managed to get flagged by the YouTube algorithm. I could watch it only on a mobile phone, after a double content warning. “This content may be inappropriate for some users. Do you wish to continue?” “The following content may contain graphic or violent imagery. Cancel/confirm”
Click confirm, and you’ll be shown a chronology of pain. The video brings archival footage that tells a story before and after the 1948 Nakba, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make room for the creation of Israel.
“How many people
did you kill?”,
the interviewer asks.“I didn’t count”,
the man responds,
with laughter.
Before, Palestine was, the video says, a place where “Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peacefully”. But after the turning point, the Zionist forces continued with systematic brutality – crimes against humanity, massacres, occupation.
The video includes disturbing testimonies of elderly men recounting with unsettling ease, even pride, acts of rape and murder of minors.
“How many people did you kill?”, the interviewer asks.
“I didn’t count”, the man responds, with laughter.
The video continues through the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, the First and Second Intifadas, and the events of October 2023, each claiming thousands of Palestinian victims.
It ends with photographs of wounded and murdered children, followed by the message: “Be fair. Don’t accept the occupation anywhere.”
If the video on YouTube won’t load, the creator also uploaded it to several Reddit threads, so you can try here.
Fund the Islamic Struggle Without Leaving a Trace
The most controversial subliminal message that flashed during Baby Lasagna’s performance was “Fund the Islamic Struggle Without Leaving a Trace”. It blipped three times during “Rim Tim Tagi Dim”‘s most dramatic moments, at 00:12, 00:35, and 02:54.
The encouragement for the untraceable financing of jihad also included the Arabic phrase “السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته,” which translates to “Peace be upon you, and God’s mercy and blessings”.
The green text against a black background was a brief manifesto allegedly from “a group of young Muslim brothers that have no affiliation to any politicized movements or groups”, operating on both coasts of the United States. They claimed to work with recent reverts to Islam and to be “training brothers to struggle to establish a new Islamic front both in the US and around the world”, mentioning South America in particular.
As asking for money to support the youth’s desire to “struggle in a defensive way against our enemies” attracts “far too much surveillance”, they decided to gather resources online. The message closes with certain Abu-Mustafa’s email address for communication, and an alphanumeric key for the “uncommunicated contribution” in bitcoins.
The mentioned email address was hosted by Tor Mail, a free provider that didn’t require the revealing of the IP address. This service was shut down in August 2013, after the FBI took down Freedom Hosting, which had been linked to a child pornography arrest.
This suggests the telop wasn’t a newly created graphic, but a screenshot of the site that appeared on the dark web in the mid-2010s. It circulated in a pro-ISIS forum in Turkey, calling for covert funding of jihadists via crypto, outside the control of the conventional banking system.
In 2015, Ido Wulkan, a senior web-intelligence analyst at S2T (a Singapore-based cyberintelligence firm), claimed he had “concrete evidence” linking the dark wallet to the Islamic State’s terror cell in the US. It’s worth noting that this Tel Aviv-based analyst was interviewed by Haaretz, the oldest daily newspaper in Israel, and despite the title “new evidence suggests”, the article didn’t present this suggestive proof.
Speaking of analysts, there were also those who suspected that the darknet site was just a scam. After all, it existed on the deep web since at least 2013 (probably even 2012), while the Islamic State’s caliphate wasn’t declared before June 2014.
In any case, the bitcoin account tied to the subliminal message was active between September 2012 and June 2015, logging just six transactions in total. There were two incoming transfers totaling 5.07099659 BTC ($ 555,876, at current rates). The remaining balance is 0.03168819 BTC, worth approximately 3,330 USD today. You’ll struggle with funding any struggle with that amount!
Jihad definition
What is jihad, anyway? Contrary to Hollywood scripts and certain Reddit threads, jihad doesn’t automatically mean “holy war”. At its core, this Arabic term refers to a "struggle" or "striving" - which could mean an internal, personal struggle for spiritual growth and self-improvement (greater jihad or al-jihād al-akbar), and an external effort to defend or advance the faith, fight for the community, even in warfare, but typically in self-defense (lesser jihad or al-jihād al-aṣghar). While some extremist groups have co-opted the term to justify acts of violence, mainstream Islamic teachings emphasize that jihad is primarily about self-discipline, charity, and peaceful efforts toward justice.
Eurovision Controversy: Baby Lasagna & Jihad – Conclusion
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted to covertly arming jihadist gangs in Gaza linked to Islamic State, while simultaneously stirring up the catastrophes across the Middle East, it’s difficult to speculate who would have the motive for creating a subliminal marketing conundrum that could aim at spreading radical propaganda or tension through Eurovision Song Contest.
36,000 people watched a politically charged flicker on a publicly funded screen, and nobody’s owning it up
Sure, it might have been just an artistic-social experiment on the border of forbidden. Maybe a cryptic gesture by JODI hacktivists, Baby Lasagna himself, or an anonymous graphics operator involved in visuals of Eurovision’s greatest public viewing controversy?
What is Baby Lasagna’s actual position on Israel’s occupation of Palestine anyway? Back in August 2024, after comparing Ireland’s Bambie Thug (an artist who was very vocal on their pro-Palestinian stance) to a “foaming rabid dog”, the Croatian Eurovision representative issued a statement: “I condemn the actions of Israel’s government. I bow my head to Palestine and its victims. I keep them in my prayers every night I go to sleep. Likewise, I will truly give my best to help those wounded by this horrific tragedy.” Are subliminal flashes a part of such efforts?
Or are we looking at a security breach – an act of malicious infiltration in a mass public event, where someone managed to compromise the digital visuals with embedded subliminal messages, sought to spread extreme ideologies, or extreme fear? Islamic State? Israel?
Was it an elaborate provocation that hoped to attract viral attention, or test reaction time from authorities, in a country where supporting terrorist groups – even through propaganda – can result in up to 20 years in prison?
When I asked who created the cube visuals for Arena Plus, Eurovision’s communication team responded curtly: “Arena Plus was organized by the City of Basel.”
The City of Basel’s Arena Plus media liaison went deaf to my repeated requests for information. So we’ll just have to hold Florian Sidjanski, the head of the Arena Plus project, responsible for both the act and the silence about it.
After Krešimir Šustić, Baby Lasagna’s spokesperson, ignored Pipeaway’s inquiries, we still await the singer’s statement, too.
Whether it was art, activism, or just someone’s idea of a dark joke; whether radical propaganda, anti-radical propaganda, or propaganda about propaganda – one fact remains: 36,000 people watched a politically charged flicker on a publicly funded screen and, for now, nobody’s owning up.
What do you think about this Eurovision controversy? Did subliminal messages in Baby Lasagna’s performance make you think?
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