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?”
Silas Coker
There is ethnic & religious bigotry in Iran, even formal (as there is in many places, including the US), and it is inexcusable. However, there are no bantustans, no siege of a major population centre, no colonialism and systematic land theft. Iran has an oppressive governmnet, but it is not an apartheid state.
I’m not making excuses for the Iranian government, they are absolutely awful, just like the Tories and the Republicans are, and many others. However, they are not genocidal, they are not war criminals, they are not an apartheid state.
Silas Coker
China isn’t a hellhole, and neither is Iran, and neither is Palestine. People who are oppressed can live meaningful lives and enjoy themselves.
People in China and Iran and Palestine can be educated, get married, have children, write poetry and everything else that people do.
People in the USA, UK, Israel, France and the rest of ‘our’ ‘enlightened’ ‘West’ can have repetitive, meaningless jobs that take up all their energy and keep them living precariously, they can be sacked, they can lose their homes, they can live in fear of being beaten up by racists or other bigots, they can be isolated socially with no control over their lives and no political power.
Silas Coker
You’re telling us we’re hypocrites for picking on Israel when there are others, while telling us what ‘real’ human rights abuses are. No BDS activist I have ever heard as claimed that Chinese human rights abuse, or any other abuse, ‘pales in comparison’ to anything. You are the one deciding that some peoples’ suffering is important, and others’ is not, and projecting this on all activists you don’t like!
You are the hypocrite.
Silas Coker
” Whatever the wrongs of the Israeli government they are nowhere comparable”
Exactly what a white South African would have said about themselves 🙂 I’m sure you’re a lovely person and see only lovely things in your own country. And you almost never have to meet Arabs or treat them as equals. I’m sure they’re all fine!
Silas Coker
The BNP’s stance on Iraq (per se) is not discredited. However, any argument they make to defend themselves is flawed unless its premises do not apply to them. The same goes for Apartheid. Just because the Apartheid regime said things doesn’t make them wrong, but any argument they made to defend themselves is.
The premises of your argument, that the BDS campaign is selective, that there are other human rights abuses that are not targeted – are obviously true of the campaign against the South African Apartheid regime.
If opposition to the Iraq war logically entails that the BNP’s racism is justified then I will embrace the neocons 🙂