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
“Which is worthless since they have declared all Israelis to be enemies, regardless of age, sex or etnicity”
True, they are supporting the declaration on the Sunna where Muhammad ordered the use of siege engine against a city with women and children saying they are all the same.
“Israel has elimitaed any chance of a Palestinian state emerging.”
Ridiculous, the fakestinians have consistently refused statehood. You even made an excuse for their doing so in 1948, where they instead started a war to eliminate Israel. You are deliberately and dishonestly making the argument that since you think they can’t succeed, they don’t have the intention. I know that you abhor the truth and all its implications, but their continued insistence that Israel is illegitimate is an expression of their eliminationist intent. You can also go the website of the PA’s departments and see that their view of Palesting includes all of Israel’s land.
The settlement wasn’t illegal since the West Bank doesn’t belong to anyone. It wasn’t one fakestinian who commited the murder but a pack of terrorists and they won’t face punishment because they’ve been feted as heroes. BTW, have you forgotten that you just recently denied that this happened at all.
I don’t consider nearly 400 children not that many, I just consider them to few for hundreds of _infants_ to have died. Being a moron and a nazi you just don’t realize that an infant is new born. Most of the children killed in the Gaza fighting was out in the streets cheering on the shooters. The “brave” fighters of Hamas hide behind children so that you racists then can whine about the evil Jooos.
Andre De Angelis
“True, they are supporting the declaration on the Sunna where Muhammad ordered the use of siege engine against a city with women and children saying they are all the same.”
Just like the book of Joshua, where the Hebrews were ordered to massacre men, women and children.
In Ethannan, Ekev and Shoftim there are unambiguous divine instructions to wipe out all the Canaanites[1] – men, women and children.
Try reading Deuteronomy (chapter 7, 20) and
Joshua, chapter 11.They are after all, both Abrahamic faiths.
“Ridiculous, the fakestinians have consistently refused statehood.”
False. They were promised statehood in 1915 by the British and then declared statehood in 1988, and then applies twice for recognition at the UN.
Pierre Orts, chairman of Mandate Commission of the League Of Nations said that :
“ The mandate, in Article 7, obliged Mandatory to enact a nationality law, which again showed Palestinians formed a nation, & that Palestine was a State, though provisionally under guardianship. It was, moreover, unnecessary to labor the point; there was no doubt whatever that Palestine was a separate political entity.”
And then there’s the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Declaration_of_Independence
” You even made an excuse for their doing so in 1948, where they instead started a war to eliminate Israel.”
That’s not what they did. The partition plan was voted in 1947, and Ben Gurion himself said it was only temporary, that he would abolish it to reclaim all of Palestine.
“You can also go the website of the PA’s departments and see that their view of Palesting includes all of Israel’s land.”
Netenyahu and Olmert have both declared that they consider all of the land from the Sea to the Jordan River to be Israel.
Andre De Angelis
As a racist you would know.
Baltiron
Oh yes the Israelis tried to wipe out the fakestinians, with the result that there’s ten times as many of them as there were in 1920. The evil Jews must be the most incompetent genociders in history.
There’s even more fakestinians living in Israel right now, than there were in the 1920s.
Only a moron would believe the BS you emit.
Baltiron
So you’re actually quoting one of the mainstream racist sites on the net? I saw their proud declaration myself on their channel.