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?”
Steve Beinart
Jews were there first? Only for thousands of years.
Plus, half the Jews now in Israel are Middle Eastern! Their families were stuck living in Muslim countries for a thousand years. Persecuted by law. Third class non-citizen dhimmis. Oppressed for centuries.
So now they have less than 1 percent of the Middle East. And STILL the Muslims can’t stand it. Can’t stand the idea that there are Jews in the neighborhood that they can’t murder at will, as they did for centuries.
Steve Beinart
He’s an ungrateful wretch. The technology that makes it possible for him to have a life came straight from Israeli geniuses.
Steve Beinart
The evil human rights abuses being done by China and Iran are a thousand times worse than those done by Israel or the US.
Steve Beinart
The Jews were there first by thousands of years. Half the Jews now in tiny Israel are Middle Eastern. They don’t have the right to 1% of the MIddle East?
Yacov Mayers
it doesn’t surprise me. The world treats Israel differently, and its generally very biased against its policies. Its blatant anti-semitism but disguised as anti zionism. Unfortunately our people and our homeland is never going to be judged to the same standards as other nations – but stuff them all. We don’t need Hawkins visit, we wont lose sleep over it. I just hope that Hawkins has read the Palestinian manifesto which calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.