Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
After a great deal of confusing reports, it was confirmed yesterday that physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of a conference in Israel next month after being lobbied by pro-Palestinian campaigners.
Initially some had claimed his decision to pull out of the conference was due to ill health, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval cleared the matter up.
“This is his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”
So “respect for the boycott” was a humanitarian gesture, then?
Ok. But why did professor Hawking see fit to visit Iran in 2007 for a conference? As far as I am aware, there was no statement at the time from Hawking refusing to travel to the Islamic Republic out of “respect” for the country’s political dissidents, or until the government stopped executing homosexuals.
A year earlier, in 2006, Stephen Hawking visited China, whose government is responsible for large scale human rights abuses in Tibet. Tibet is, as Human Rights Watch noted several years before his visit, “a place where some of the most visible and egregious human rights violations committed by the Chinese state have occurred”. A 2008 UN report found that the use of torture in Tibet was “widespread” and “routine”.
There’s no need to be an apologist for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to question where professor Hawking’s moral compass was when he chose to visit these two serial human rights abusers – and ask why it has suddenly appeared when the country in question is Israel.
Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
346 Responses to “So why did Stephen Hawking think it was ok to visit Iran and China?”
JarekAF
Then how did so many Jews vote for Ahmadinejad? I’m being sincere here. I thought they could vote for whoever.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3729203,00.html
Alex Ross
Sorry…should have been clearer…I was talking about elections for the Majlis…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_minorities_in_Iran#Reserved_Parliament_seats
As far as presidential elections go…all can apparently vote but only Shia musims approved by Guardian Council can stand…
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90210.htm
JarekAF
Also, secondly, Israel is not remotely comparable to Apartheid S/A (as a broadly liberal democratic state).
Keep wishing it, doesn’t make it so. In the United States, we have the Bill of Rights. One of the funny one’s is the 3rd Amendment: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law..
The picture below is a Palestinian home being occupied by Israeli soldiers. They don’t exactly have a Bill of Rights. Also, Desmond Tutu, someone who knows something about Apartheid, doesn’t find the comparison to be off.
See that other pic. See those little specs of Green on the picture on the right. Nothing like the Bantustans from before, right?
Dan Fox
George Dibb: where does James Bloodworth imply anti-semitism? Nowhere. Total straw man. And one seen a lot from anti-zionists: false accusations that Israel’s critics are being smeared as anti-Semites when they are simply being challenged.
Barnz Mcaleer: you ask ‘Whose land is Iran occupying? What indigenous people is Iranian govt ethnically cleansing to make way for some colonial fantasy?’. The Ahwazi Arabs, have been subjected to all that, and in part to provide land for the training of Hezbollah, Iran’s rather empire-building style proxy expeditionary force. So there’s that.
Alex Ross
But aren’t you confusing Israel with the Occupied Territories (OTs)? In which case, my above point still stands.