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?”
Andre De Angelis
Wrong buddy.
“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel like South Africa, is an apartheid state”
(Rand Daily Mail, 23 Novemeber 1961).
Former Soutgh African Prime Minister – Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.
David Moss
A second point: the idea that this would be “hypocritical” is a rather bold one and not easily defensible. Is it unacceptable to boycott one (ex hypothesi) bad thing (a country, event or product, whatever) if you don’t boycott ALL comparable bad things? For example, if you boycott a prominent brand of clothes that uses sweatshop labour, is this a bad thing if you buy any other clothes (or other products) that use sweatshop labour? I would think surely not. To make the point even clearer: would it be better to buy the prominent brand of of sweatshopped clothes (boycotting none), to avoid hypocrisy? Surely not: it is a good thing to boycott bad things, in this way, and doing so does not oblige you to boycott all such things. If it did, then doing so would be impossibly demanding.
The charge of “hypocrisy” then has to be viewed as a rhetorical political strategy employed precisely because Hawking is criticising Israel and not other countries. Israel undoubtedly receives significantly more ‘defence’ of this kind than others (e.g. if you criticise Israeli policy, you are suspect of anti-semitism; if you criticise the UK/Uganda/any other country- nothing of the kind). Were Hawking to refuse to visit Burma, on principled grounds, I’m quite sure no-one (outside Burma) would be saying “How dare he? Doesn’t he know X state is just as bad?”
shalomaleichem
Try reading the whole thread again, I have already answered your objection in the case of South Africa. .
As for your other objections
1) “Its just their choice” I agree but when people make choices based on racist considerations they deserve censure for doing so.
2) The nation of Israel is 3,500 thousand years old. Your point is redundant on account of it wholly ignoring history.
3) International treaties awarded national rights to the Jewish people in the western part of Palestine in recognition of the Jewish people’s historical connection with the land. The people who made this decision had the legal authority to do so. Israel does not occupy any territory other than that which is its own lawful possession.
Andre De Angelis
“You say very matter of fact that maybe he wasn’t lobbied in advance of visits to these other countries.”
Are you suggesting he was never lobbied by pro Israeli lobbies?
“Does it not trouble you that the only lobby which vociferously advocates for a boycott on human rights grounds, ignores the world’s worst offenders in order to pursue the alleged crimes of a nation who have been persecuted in every country and age in which they have lived?”
What an absurd sentence! Nations have borders and being persecuted does not give one the right o persecute others.
As for the argument that there are worse offender, do you think those who murder only one person should be allowed to roam free until all those guilty of multiple homicides are captured?
“BDS is demonstrably a racist campaign.
BDS is against racism, therefore it is the opposite of racism. Then again, maybe the Chinese can accuse their critics of racism too right?
shalomaleichem
1) Sanction on Iran are justified on account of their government’s threats of genocide. It is a unique circumstance that permits a deviation from the moral norm of not punishing the innocent with the guilty.
In contrast there is nothing remarkable about Israel holding the territory on which its people are the indigenous population and to which it has title under international law (San Remo, Sevres, etc).
2) Anyone with a brain between their ears recognises that your claim about Israel being identical to apartheid South Africa is simply false. Israel is a functioning democracy in which all citizens have equal rights regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc, which has no laws mandating or even permitting public separation on ethnic lines, This is the opposite of apartheid South Africa.
3) if you genuinely believe that Israel is more violent than Hamas (and I suspect you do not) I can only recommend you visit a good psychiatrist.