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?”
Baltiron
Only the fakestinians fantasize about exterminating their opponent, and only the fakestinians are breaking off peace negotiations and only the fakestinians send armed killers across the border to knife infants in their beds.
All the while maintaining the fiction that it’s the Israelis that are the aggressors, helped by their stoogies among you communists and nazis.
Baltiron
The theocrats have produced more than a thousand times the refugees and corpses than the Shah did. Only a communist thug would prefer the former to the latter.
Baltiron
Still defending the centre of Holocaust denial, I see.
Baltiron
He far more probably believe that we should keep our heads and remember who the bad guys are, a sore disappointment to the racist thugs who want to spread hate propaganda.
Baltiron
You’re a true pro-nazi I see. The BNP split over their leader’s change of mind to support Israel and join the EDL, instead of the fakestinians. Some 90% of his minions stayed with their natural inclination staying in the BNP. So your evidence is as phony as youir other claims.
As for Hamas Determination it’s in their charter, the one that also states that their will be no peace as long as they don’t rule the planet.
FInally, no Israeli prime minister has sent killlers across the border to knife infants in their beds. That’s a fakestinian monopoly.