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?”
Solon
Hatred of behaviors as exhibited by Jews and US policymakers???
Solon
get over yourself, Pearlman.
Mostafa Roshan’s little son http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/11/iran-nuclear-scientist-killed http://konflikty.wp.pl/kat,1020223,title,Miedzy-Izraelem-a-Iranem-trwa-wojna-sluzb-specjalnych,wid,14424021,wiadomosc.html?ticaid=110902
is growing up without a father because Mossad stuck a bomb on his car. You don’t see Iranians bellyaching every minute of every day about it, tho; that seems to be a trait specific to Israelis with German names.
Sassan
Thx for the ad hominems and typical slander. Not only was I born in Iran but have been back 5+ times over the years including over 8-months in 2010. Everyone knows that you cannot leave Islam under this regime. It is punishable by death.
Ginger Beer
“as exhibited by Jews” eh? Not even bothering with the “Zionist” figleaf?
Solon
More of the Israelish “Bellyaching Blues.”
Iranians never left their own country to opportunistically exploit another country, then demand to be in charge of it.
On the other hand, Iran has been invaded, despoiled, exploited, and subjected to famine, occupation, division, and subversion possibly more than any land in history.
Moreover, having offered Jews the most magnanimous situation in all of history, and for longer than any other nation in history, Persians endured Esther’s slaughter of 75 thousand innocent Persians, an event that Jews celebrate annually, TO THIS DAY; and right this day, Jews seek to destroy Iran, again.
Americans, wake up:
Jews lived prosperously in Egypt for 480 years, then Jews slaughtered the first-born of Egyptians. That slaughter is celebrated annually as “Passover.”
Jews lived prosperously in Poland for hundreds of years, as middle-men to the ruling authorities, while the common man in Poland suffered and the nation remained backward. (If Jews are so smart, why didn’t they create prosperity & “democracy” in Poland, over the 8 or 9 centuries they dwelt there?)
Jews lived in Germany from ~700 AD, initially as traders along the Rhine. Jews enjoyed prosperity, but contributed little to overall Prussian/Bavarian unity or economic growth. When Germany unified in 1870, and leapt forward in the industrial revolution, Polish Jews migrated to Germany, where they attempted to take over. Germans endured Jewish-imposed dislocations and subversion of their culture, finances, education system for about 50 years; the Jewish take-over of Germany peaked in Weimar. Hitler organized nonviolent resistance to the Weimar failures.
His success so frightened Russo- , Anglo- and American-Jews like Chaim Weizmann, Ewan Montagu, Louis Brandeis, Sam Untermyer, and Rabbi Stephen Wise that they colluded to disseminate “atrocity propaganda” against Germany, and attempted to destroy Germany economically. When Hitler & Hjalmar Schacht saw through their scheme and undermined it by end-running Jewish financiers, aforementioned zionists called for the “Egypt-treatment”, or an “Estherine” – slaughter, of the German people and their culture & land. Jews were at the forefront of the firebombing campaign that destroyed Germany, the first use of “weapons of mass destruction” to “terrorize” a civilian population, in history.
The “heirs” of Weizmann, Montagu, Brandeis, Untermyer, etc. are pulling exactly the same stunt against Iran. This time, the zionists are using the USA to destroy another nation.
When they are finished with the USA, they will destroy it, too. Or what’s left of it.