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
Of course it’s an aprtheid state.
A recent Haaretz poll reported that nearly 60% of Jewish Israelis believe that a system of apartheid is already in place in Israel.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/majority_of_israeli_jews_support_apartheid_regime_survey_finds/
Former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general ambassador to South Africa Alon Liel: “If you, President Obama, intend to come here for a courtesy visit – don’t come. Don’t come! We don’t need you here for a courtesy visit. You cannot come to an area that exhibits signs of apartheid and ignore them. That would simply be an unethical visit. You yourself know full well that Israel is standing at the apartheid cliff. If you don’t deal with this topic during your visit, the responsibility will at the end of the process also lie with you.” (2013)
Israeli Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak:
“As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” (2010)
Former Israeli Minister of Education Yossi Sarid: “What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid… What should frighten us, however, is not the description of reality, but reality itself… The Palestinians are unfortunate because they have not produced a Nelson Mandela; the Israelis are unfortunate because they have not produced an F.W. de Klerk. “(2008)
Andre De Angelis
No, he committed no war crimes against Iraqis. The US did.
Andre De Angelis
False. He signed the agreement on the part of the PLO.
He gave no such speeches, and you won’t find one where he said that.
And right of return is guaranteed as a right to refugees under international law, so Araft had no right to sign that away. Remember that Israel agreed to allow refugees to return under UN194, as a per condition to being admitted to the UN, so it is facetious for you to suggest this is now somehow unreasonable.
No state in the world had recognized Israel as a Jewish stet, let alone any so called right to remain majority Jewish. That would be as repugnant and criminal as recognizing America’s right to remain majority white and Christian. In fact, what you are demanding would be like demanding that North American Indians do so.
Andre De Angelis
So your another lover of US puppet tyrants
DavidBernstein
Whenever addressing Israeli or Western audiences, he would habitually extol the “peace of the brave” he had signed with “my partner Yitzhak Rabin.” At the same time, he depicted the peace accords to his Palestinian constituents as transient arrangements of the moment. He made constant allusions to the “phased strategy” and repeatedly insisted on the “right of return,” a standard Palestinian euphemism for Israel’s destruction through demographic subversion.[4] He leavened his speech with historical and religious metaphors, most notably the Treaty of Hudaybiya, signed by the Prophet Muhammad with the people of Mecca in 628, only to be disavowed by Muhammad a couple of years later when the situation shifted in his favor.[5] http://www.meforum.org/605/arafats-grand-strategy#_ftnref5
Both the PA and Hamas charters call for a Muslim state. Many states have endorsed Israel as a Jewish state (that is, a state of the Jewish people, not a religious state), and indeed that was the basis of the U.N. partition resolution in 1948.
But in the end, you are acknowledging that the Palestinians have made no serious offer, i.e., an offer that puts limits on the right of return such that the result would be two states for two peoples, not two Palestinian states.