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 the left, the nazis and the islamists wage war on the Jooos. Your frequent lies prove my point.
Gaza is not besieged for the simple reason that the Israelis don’t want the place, for the simple reasons that the Israelis permit resources to be shipped into it.
Baltiron
Yeah, Salon. A few years ago I spotted a Holocaust denying nazi writing articles on it, and their editors refused to do anything about it until I sicked the ADL on them. Why don’t you quote David Duke as well? He also thinks there’s apartheid in Israel.
Baltiron
Do read up on Cyrus the Great, Darius and Xerxes.
Baltiron
Some more mendacious moral equivalence arguments. The Israelis don’t quote those parts justifying genocide, like the Hamas does.
The fakestinians were not promised statehood in 1915. The hashemite clan was promised territories if they sided with the British against the Ottiomans. In return for the participation of 5.000 irregulars the Hashemites were given Iraq and Jordan. The latter was more than 80% of the Palestinian mandate that was supposed to be the Jewish national home.
Orts quote referred to the Jews who were called Palestinans at the time. The fakestinians usurped that name in the sixties. At the time of Ort’s quote they called themselves Southern Syrians.
They did renounce statehood in 1948, in the PLO:s charter they were still calling for a united Arab state encompassing all Arab lands in the ME.
All of Ben Gurion, Nyetenyahu nor Olmert have been misquoted by you.
Andre De Angelis
“Some more mendacious moral equivalence arguments.”
Those who reject moral equivalence are those who believe in superiority and entitlement. In other words, racist supremacists who think it infantile terms where we’re good and they’re bad.
“The Israelis don’t quote those parts justifying genocide, like the Hamas does.”
Actually they do, which is why Netenyahu is obsessed with mentioning about Amalekites.
“The fakestinians were not promised statehood in 1915”
Yes they were.
“The latter was more than 80% of the Palestinian mandate that was supposed to be the Jewish national home.”
Wrong.
The authors of the Balfour Declaration employed the circumlocution “national home for the Jewish people”, not “homeland”. On October 31, 1917, when the Balfour Declaration came before the War Cabinet, Balfour summarized the arguments for and against it. He specifically addressed Curzon’s objections to the use of the vague term “national home” maintaining that it did not mean the establishment of an independent Jewish state. See Karl Ernest Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: the invention of the modern Middle East, page 120
Many, if not most, Jews (including several Cabinet Ministers) were non-Zionists who did not fancy Palestine as their homeland. They insisted that the Declaration contain a safeguarding clause with respect to the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Supporters claimed that “a national home” didn’t mean a state or autonomous government. For example, Lord Cromer thought it would only be a symbolic spiritual center and a reservoir of Jewish culture.
“Orts quote referred to the Jews who were called Palestinans at the time.”
Wrong on all counts.
1. Balfour, San Remo and LOn all refer to Jews as “the Jews”.
2. If he was only referrring to Palestinian Jews, then immigrant Jews, that would have excluded them.
3. All inhabitants of Palestine (Jews, Christians and Muslims) were regarded as Palestinians at the time.
“They did renounce statehood in 1948, in the PLO:s charter they were still calling for a united Arab state encompassing all Arab lands in the ME”
False again. IN his latter to Rabin, Arrafat renounced those statements.
My quotes from Ben Gurion, Nyetenyahu nor Olmert were all references.
Epic fail!