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
Are you really going to tell us that huffingtonpost, which includes Alan Dershowitz, David Harris, and Bernard Levy, as contributors is racist?
Wow, you really have lost a grip.
Andre De Angelis
“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 Palestinians were smashed and disarmed by the British on behalf of the Jews, by 1937, they were disarmed and leaderless while the Jews were armed to the teeth.
“There’s even more fakestinians living in Israel right now, than there were in the 1920s.”
In 1/10th of the territory yes.
Andre De Angelis
Funny you should bring that up.
THEN:
“The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially” ~ Robert E. Lee, 1856
“South
Africa has achieved for its nonwhite people the best education and the highest standard of living among all the blacks of Africa” ~ James Kilpatrick, 1971
NOW:
“Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only
Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. I want you to stop
for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of one-percent are truly free, and they’re all citizens of Israel!”
~ Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister), May 2011
“Israel on the West Bank is more democratic than any Arab or Muslim state in the world today” ~ Alan Dershowitz, May 2013
MORAL:
If you want to know what the slaves think, DON’T ask the slave-owners …ask the slaves!
Andre De Angelis
“Of course the left, the nazis and the islamists wage war on the Jooos. Your frequent lies prove my point.”
Don’t be ridiculous. 70% of Jews in America are left wing. Are they waging war on Jews?
Gaza in an open air prison. Israel’s internal documents who that the blockade has nothing to do with security – it’s just collective punishment for not being Jewish.
Andre De Angelis
“The most important ingredience in apartheid was the prevention of mixing races through sex, there’s noting like it in Israel.”
According to what definition? The one you just made up?
Of course that exists in Israel anyway. Jews who marry Palestinians are not permitted to bring them to Israel and there are countless campaigns against intermarriage.
So by your own definition, Israel in indeed apartheid.