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?”
Ginger Beer
Yeah whatever – so which is it that drives your obsession with Israel – hatred of Jews or hatred of America?
Ginger Beer
Perhaps he should concentrate on cosmology and not wade into areas he has little knowledge of
Andre De Angelis
1) False. The government of Iran has never theater end genocide. In fact, threats of genocide are mentioned nowhere in the resolutions.
“In contrast there is nothing remarkable about Israel holding the territory on which its people are the indigenous population”
Indigenous populations don’t arrive by boat from other countries. The indigenous population are the Palestinians and native Jewish population.
San Remo stipulated that the political and civil rights of the non Jewish population were to be protected. Israel has violated those terms.
2) South African leaders have themselves identified Israel at
as an apartheid state.
Israel is not a democracy, it’s a democracy for Jews only. It’s citizens DO NOT have equal rights, hence the more than 30 racist laws discriminating against non Jews.
3) it’s easy to demonstrate that Israel is more violent than Hamas. Israel kills 100 times as many civilians.
Andre De Angelis
No it makes you the idiot because his comments were not intended to be disparaging. He was actually admirer of Israel’s apartheid system.
ryhope1
George: No self-respecting Zionist would ever allow those little distractions called “facts” to stand in the way of their goals, one of which is to invoke the “antisemitism” slur against anyone who doesn’t support their repugnant ideology. And the more absurd the claim, the more loudly they assert it. If they can claim, with a straight face, that they want peace while expanding their illegal settlement activities; if they can claim that stone-throwing 10-year-old Palestinian boys represent an “existential threat” to Israel; if they can claim that a Jewish person who criticizes Israel is a “self-hater;” how can they have any problem with merely concealing the basic fact you’ve referred to, if doing so would further their odious cause?