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?”
adele
David,
1) as an economist I know that your statement “Through the first intifada, the WB and Gaza had among the highest economic growth rates in the world” is false, but if you make this statement you need to provide evidence from an accredited and independent (e.g., non-Israeli) institution.
2) you cannot expect to, without some measure of resistance, usurp a people’s land (pre-1948), militarily occupy the remaining land (post 1967) and continue to do unilateral land theft on land that doesn’t belong to you in order to impose settlement colonies, impose collective punishment at will and and all during this time deny the occupied population the ability to have their grievances heard by a fair and impartial judiciary system.
In other words, abuse comes back to bite the abuser sooner or later and afterwards the abuser can’t then go crying about victimized.
No amount of excuses and distorted lies can hide the truth, it is colonialism plain and simple.
It’s funny, so many people keep harping about China, and trying to play the moral relativism card, but, unlike the Israeli apologists vis-a-vis Israel, I never hear anyone defending China’s brutal tactics in Tibet, nor do I ever hear anyone condemning the Tibetan people for resisting their violent occupation….that is apart from certain Chinese nationalists.
adele
I guess it was also racist to boycott the South African white government for their crimes against the South African black population.
adele
I did not witness the apartheid conditions in South Africa, but I did see the conditions (and importantly, the Restrictions and control mechanisms used by the occupying power) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But I will leave it to others who are in a position to make comparisons:
In 2004, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote:
“The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure – in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.”
In July 2008, 21 South African activists, including ANC members, visited Israel and Occupied Palestine. Their conclusion was unanimous. Israel is far worse than apartheid as former Deputy Minister of Health and current MP Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge explained:
“What I see here is worse than what we experienced – the absolute control of people’s lives, the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw….racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa.”
Sunday Times editor, Mondli Makhanya, went further: “When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. It is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.”
Solon
It occurs to me that BDS is not the ONLY arrow in the quiver.
C Span is the I-lobby’s most reliable outlet for bamboozling the American public. This morning’s appearance on Wash’tn Journal of Tibet’s prime minister in exile sealed that conclusion (in my mind): nearly everything the PM said about Tibet vis a vis China could be said about Palestine relative to Israel. But not only does one never (or only with rare exceptions) see a representative of the Palestinian people in the WashJourn chair for 30 or 45 min., if a caller uses his 50 seconds on air to criticize Israel, his call will be clipped by the WashJourn moderator. And if not, then CAMERA will attack the moderator, C Span in general, and the entire universe as we know it for their (wait for it) antisemitism.
Judging from the increasing frequency of such clipped calls, and of CAMERA’s complaints about ‘antisemitism’ on C Span, Americans are waking up.
Think about how C Span operates: “just 5 cents each month” from your cable bill supports C Span!”
Such a deal! Americans pay for their own brainwashing!
Comcast and Time Warner are by far the largest of US cable providers, with 22 mil. and 12 mil. subscribers, respectively. Warners got their start in Hollywood in the 1930s, pumping out war propaganda in support of the Anglo-Jewish project to destroy Germany and scare German Jews into migrating to Palestine. It is still controlled by zionist interests. Comcast was founded and is run by Jewish persons whose zionist leanings are not known, except by Comcast’s stream of generally anti-Iranian, anti-Islam pro-Israel programming.
“Return to the Constitution” and “get prayer back in schools” are vague and amorphic ways for Americans to re-exert control over their own culture, and media.
I suggest that Americans who seek a “return” of “American values” in media and foreign policy, UNPLUG.
Snip the cable cord.
Read to your family instead of parking in front of the ziocaine machine.
“Divest” AND UNPLUG from Comcast and Time Warner.
Mark
Calling names doesn’t make what you are saying make any more sense