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
Of course they deny any relationship with the Jews at all. If you ask them yourself they totally deny that the Jews have ever lived in the area.
Baltiron
Yup, those who call radio to rant about African-Americans have exactly the same problem.
Baltiron
The fakestininans have indeed tried to do so, but so far their plain dysfunctionality has permitted the Jews to survive.
Ginger Beer
Israel is not an apartheid state – please stop telling lies
Andre De Angelis
“Which is worthless since they have declared all Israelis to be enemies, regardless of age, sex or etnicity”
False.
“A clear case of projection, it’s the fakestinians who repeatedly state that their goal is to eliminate their enemy from river to sea.”‘
Again projections seeing as Israel has elimitaed any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.
It’s a case of the world crying wolf.
“The 1967 border, and a group of terrorists recently killed an entire family of Israelis.”
False. The Israeli family was living in an illegal settlement and it was one Palestinian who committed the gruesome murder. The murder should face the most serve punishment, but he was not acting on behalf of anyone but himself.
“The number of fatalities aren’t that many.”
If you consider nearly 400 children not that many.