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?”
Limi
This is ridiculous. Why didn’t he boycott Iran or China? Maybe he’s a human being and like other human beings, capable of changing his mind. Maybe he wasn’t committed to activism back then, and now he is. Maybe he somehow went to China in 2006 without reading a 2008 UN report. Maybe he felt that attending a conference on string theory in China and a physics competition in Iran were in some way different to a party about how great Israel is.
thos
because a boycott by academics HAS existed of late, and although this particular event isn’t scholarly, Hawking’s an academic who’s doing some boycotting.
JarekAF
I don’t believe the factual record is so clear that anyone can credibly make such claim. Even if it were true, it doesn’t excuse the on-going occupation.
Well, Arafat was a terrible leader, thus, it’s alright if we bulldoze homes and build walls on occupied land that separate farmers from their fields and prevent students from Gaza to travel to the West Bank, and forbid the importation of seeds and livestock.
Why? Oh Terrorism.
a boycott of Israel serves not put pressure on Israel to end the occupation, but to support continued Palestinian rejectionism.
Why is that? Because you say so? Talk about semantic clap-trap. The BDS movement is non-violent resistance. I respect and stand in solidarity with the peaceful Palestinian activists seeking reform. What would acceptable resistance be to you then? It’s been 47 years. How much longer do you think it’s necessary to condition Palestinian freedom on being submissive subjects of a foreign occupying power?
ugluk2
If Israel controlled the West Bank until a peaceful solution was reached and did its best to treat the inhabitants fairly that would be one thing–but they don’t. Instead, they build settlements and have a system where there are two classes of people–Israeli settlers and Palestinians–subjected to two sets of laws. So that’s comparable to apartheid. They want to bemoan the lack of peace and heatedly deny the apartheid charge while benefiting from the situation. What “most Israelis” allegedly want doesn’t seem to matter very much, or else “most Israelis” aren’t really opposed to settlements.
ugluk2
I’ll deny it. The story on Camp David and Taba is a lot more complicated than you portray. Anyway it was Sharon who decided there would be no more peace talks and that was supposed to be the threat hanging over the Taba talks–reach an agreement quickly or Sharon might win and everyone knew what that meant. It’s funny how Sharon and his election are treated as forces of nature, not subject to moral critique. Nobody criticizes a hurricane for smashing things and hurting people and apparently Sharon is the same.
As for Olmert and Abbas, there are conflicting accounts, which doesn’t stop people from pretending there is a clearcut moral to be drawn from it.