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
Thank you for the patronising guff, please drive through
ryhope1
Actually, the fact that you have chosen not to be aware of such inanities from Israeli officials doesn’t mean they haven’t been uttered, or heard by millions of people all over the world. Indeed, the kids have not only been described as such, they are murdered almost on a daily basis as a matter of state policy. The lucky ones languish in your gulags as I write – not that I expect you to be aware of this either.
As for Hamas, yes, they also represent an existential threat because they have the capacity to destroy Israel with its 300-odd nuclear warheads. Though they also happen to be the very same “SS look-alikes” that Israel seeks recognition from as a precondition for “peace”. (Why Israel would seek recognition from SS look-alikes, I have no idea) But if you weren’t too blinded by your foul and odious ideology, you’d realize that it is your troops that are increasingly becoming “SS-like” instead.
At any rate, get lost, damn you, and damn the foul ideology that informs your repellent worldview!
Baltiron
Dear thug. It’s the Hamas that throws Hitler salutes at solemn occassions. it’s the Hamas that celebrate killers of infants, it’s the Hamas that repeatedly pledges to exterminate all Jews on the planet, it’s the Hamas that enjoy support from Nazi movements all over the West, it’s Hamas that repeatedly chants “Thank God for Hitler”.
Take _your_ odious idelogy and shove it up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Baltiron
Iran is an apartheid state, Israel isn’t.
Bill Pearlman
If anybody plays the victim card its the Palestinians. But I understand that your sorry about missing those good old days with the einzatzgruppen