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
Israel doesn’t run an apartheid system – please stop telling lies.
Gert Van Der Straaten
Yep. Israel has never made an offer that comes even remotely close to what you are suggesting here. And ‘land swaps’ is a euphemism for let’s throw away some empty desert in exchange for the West Bank settlements and all the water underneath. Israel has a simple choice to make: take the land, but take the inhabitants too and finally offer them full citizenship, or stop claiming the land and give them independence.
Dave Eff
I think the boycott is mostly useless and counter-productive.
But comparing Israel policy to Iran and China . . . the moral equivalence tells me a lot (although the *former* South Africa is still a better comparison for the apartheid state … perhaps Hawking never visited there?).
Bill Pearlman
Only Israel is apparently worthy of eradication from the planet. No other country. And the reason is the same has it has always been, hatred of Jews. The Europeans tried to finish us off in the WW2. But they are apparently not satisfied with that. Everyone knows what this is about and it’s not the Palestinians.
Bill Pearlman
Maybe if your two kids had been at the Sbarros in Jerusalem back then you might feel differently. Probably not though