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?”
ugluk2
So it would have been immoral if outsiders had supported Gandhi’s campaigns in India?
marco
http://972mag.com/mr-palestine-youll-just-have-to-wait-your-turn/70744/
JarekAF
What do you think the prospects for peace would be if Sharon weren’t a vegetable? As much as I despised him, I sense that he “got it,” insofar as he understood the demographic time bomb in the way Bibi refuses to ever acknowledge.
Jonathan Klahr
seems to me that the argument the writer is making is that it is a little ‘rich’ for someone who is morally inconsistent to be criticizing or boycotting another country for supposed moral faults.
Jonathan Klahr
it’s not really that simple though. Prior to 1967 the land presently occupied by Israel was occupied by Jordan. Jordan don’t want it back. It never belonged to the Palestinians so the idea that it is “occupied Palestinian land” is illogical and totally fictional. You could say it should be given to Jordan or even Turkey but not really to the Palestinians.