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?”
George Dibb
Excuse me? Which bit of what I wrote is Nazi inspired?
ryhope1
Alex, with all due respect, when it comes to matters relating to apartheid, I prefer Desmond Tutu’s views to yours. He lived through apartheid and has witnessed Israel’s policies at first hand, and is therefore in the best possible position to make such comparisons. And he has said openly that in many respects, Israel’s policies are worse. Which isn’t surprising at all, given that Israel was apartheid S.Africa’s staunchest ally: it not only assisted that regime with its nuclear weapons programme, but did all it could to sabotage the transition to majority rule there. Mandela called them “the third force” in one of his memoirs.
vivek sinha
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Warrington Car Centre…
Baltiron
Read up on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Aka Stalin-Hitler Pact, in which they compadres shared up Eastern Europe. You can also look at the last few years (1928-1933) of the Weimar republic when nazis and communists allied against the Social Democrats.
Hitler then later declared war on Stalin because he wanted to take the resources of the Soviet Union.
Steve Beinart
There’s plenty hypocritical about it. Israel is the good guys. They are the ones being attacked. Ten thousand rockets into Israeli civilian towns in the past few years. Each individual rocket is a war crime.
Hamas recently added crucifixion to it’s list of lawful punishments!
Crucifixion! This is who you and he are siding with. Who you are backing.
You shits just don’t like it when a Jew fights back.