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?”
Bernard G
and sorry, that should read Hawking, I confess to having no interest in science
shalomaleichem
It would have been morally inconsistent and racist for non-Indians to have boycotted only British imperialism. How else would you describe someone who says I only object to imperialism when British people do it. The behaviour of the French, Dutch, etc was no less egregious.
It is also racist when non-Palestinian people say I only boycott human rights abuses when Jews are the perpetrators.
I return to my original question: Do you think it mere coincidence that the noisiest public boycott campaign skips over the most egregious human rights abusers in order to target a nation who have been persecuted everywhere they have lived throughout the last 2,000 years?
Sassan
I am sad and disappointed. I rather delude myself and say that his cognitive faculties are declining that he made this decision but that would just be to reduce my cognitive dissonance. He has already been to Israel four times before. Maybe because it was a government event and not academia. But still, it is the wrong thing to do and it highly saddens me and disappoints me. It makes me lose a bit of respect for Dr. Hawking. And I speak as an Iranian-American atheist non-Israel non-Jew. :sigh.
I love you Dr. Hawking. I am one of your biggest admirers. But you have lost some respect from those of us who value reason. You caved in to the same Palestinian Islamofascists who would love to have you executed for being an atheist. In this respect, you have become a “Useful Idiot” to the Islamofascist cause…… 🙁
Sassan
Very good article. Iran is one big concentration camp of over 75-million people. Iranians are oppressed and terrorized by this oppressive tyrannical regime. I love Dr. Hawking but as an Iranian, I am disgusted and disappointed by him being bowing to the pressure of the Islamofascist terrorist organizations. Apartheid is what is going on in Iran. When a non-Muslim is killed, the amount of “blood money” is miniscule compared to the “blood money” required if a Muslim was killed in an accident. This regime is tyrannical, fascist, oppressive, and totalitarian. I am utterly ashamed at Dr. Hawking in this matter and the fact that he visited Iran under this tyrannical and fascist regime. It makes me quite sad. 🙁
Andre De Angelis
Yawn,
Jordan don’t want it back because they handed sovereignty over it to the PLO in 1988.
And yes, it belonged to the Palestinians under the Mandate.
Pierre Orts, chairman of Mandate Commission of the League Of Nations:
“. The mandate, in Article 7, obliged Mandatory to enact a nationality law, which again showed Palestinians formed a nation, & that Palestine was a State, though provisionally under guardianship. It was, moreover, unnecessary to labor the point; there was no doubt whatever that Palestine was a separate political entity.”
Add to this the fact that Palestinians owned more than 50% of the land title and Jews only 1948.