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
Pulling the Holocaust denial card I see, when the Holocaust is not even being discussed. A sure sign you hsven’t got a leg to stand on.
Andre De Angelis
None of the technology Hawking uses came from Israel.
The i7 was designed by Intel’s architecture design team in Hillsboro Oregon. The claims the i7 was designed in Israel are also lies.
For the i7 in particular, the Sr. Principal Engineer’s name is Ronak Singhal. He is an Indian. The design team does not consist of Israelis and is not located in Israel.
Hawking’s sentence construction software, EZ Keys, was designed and built by an american company, Words Plus, which was based in Palmdale, California. Hawkings speech synthesizer, NeoSpeech, is produced by a company based in Fremont, California and backed by Voiceware Co of Korea. It has nothing to do with Israel either.
Hawking’s laptop which ran the software used AMD chips. This was an embarrassment to Intel. Intel’s CEO at the time Gordon Moore (now retired) personally negotiated with Prof. Hawking to participate in a marketing arrangement where Hawking would use Intel provided off-the-shelf laptops sothat they could claim he used Intel equipment. The financial details of this arrangement are private, but it is a marketing expense for Intel. Intel’s Portland team flies out to England each year to check on things. Because they kept asking Hawking if they could build him something custom for this (since none of the software or hardware was actually made by Intel, the laptops were built in China), they designed and built a small audio amplifier that was louder than the one he used previously. This could also have been replaced with an off the shelf amplifier as well, but it is the basis for Intel’s claims to have contributed custom hardware. None of the Portland team that visits Prof. Hawking is Israeli either.
Andre De Angelis
He’ll be gone pretty soon and it will be great to see the back of him. Whatbwil, you Hasbrats do then without your star bogeyman?
DavidBernstein
http://www.meforum.org/605/arafats-grand-strategy#_ftnref5
DavidBernstein
The entire basis of U.N partition in 1948 was that Israel was to be the Jewish state (state of the jewish people), and the rest of the remaining British Mandate an Arab state.
It’s rich for you to complain (wrongly) about Israel wanting to be a religiously Jewish state when the draft PA constitution and the Hamas charter call for a Muslim state.
Most important, you acknowledge that the Palestinians haven’t made an offer that could potentially end the conflict because they haven’t made an offer that would limit the so-called right of return, and any offer without that would not create “two states for two people,” but one Arab state and another state in transition to being an Arab state.