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?”
Andre De Angelis
You’re welcome Sassan, you earned it.
“Everyone knows that you cannot leave Islam under this regime.”
And everyone knew Saddam had WMD. The MEK are Iranians too and they share your ideology.
Andre De Angelis
“If anybody plays the victim card its the Palestinians.”
On the contrary. Its the Israelis who insist they and they alone have security needs. Only they have the right of self defense. And of course, there is always the Holocaust or anti Semitism card they play when they are in trouble.
Baltiron
What they rejected was 56% of the territory being given away to an immigrant population.”
It doesn’t matter how you try to spin it, they rejected statehood opting for a united Arab state.
“It was land title.”
A lie, very little of the land was private. Most of that was owned by absentee landlords.
Ginger Beer
Israel is not an apartheid state – please stop telling lies
Andre De Angelis
No there have not been 3 offers.
UN181 was not an offer.
Camp David 2000 was a very bad offer. So bad that even Clinton knew how bad it was and came up with the parameters at Taba 6 months later – Barak walked out
Olmert’s offer was never put on paper and he never presented a map, nor did he stay in office long enough to deliver it anyway.
Counter offers? Yes, a massive one. In 1993, the PLO gave up any claims to the territory between Israel’s 1948 border and the Armistice lie (50% of Palestinian territory). Israel said we’ll think about it and continus stealing more land ever since.