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
“The fakestinians broke the agreement first”
No, Ben Gurion said from 1937 that the portion would be abolished and that the Jews would conquer Palestine once they had a strong enough military.
So the Jews never intended to honor the agreement in the first place.
“Israel has stuck with agreements of peace with all parties that have reciprocated, such as Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon.”
False. Carter, who authored those agreements, says Israel is in violation of them.
“The claim that Israel kills hundreds of infants is just another racist lie,”
No it’s a statistical fact.
As Mordecai Gur(Israeli politician and the 10th Chief of Staff of the IDF) said:
“The Israeli army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously. The army has never distinguished civilian from military targets, but has purposely attacked civilian targets.”
I guess Gur bought into those racist conspiracy theories from the Middle Ages too.
XRG000
Thank You for taking your time to do this.
Ginger Beer
Israel is not an apartheid state – please stop telling lies
Rob Saunders
” …they solemny swear to their desire to exterinate all Jews on the planet”
And you have a source for that, somewhere? They certainly don’t want Israel to continue as a country, and I dare say plenty of them would be happy enough to kill all the Jews in Israel (if they had been busy murdering and looting their way through my country for over 40 years I don’t suppose I’d shed too many tears either), but “all Jews on the planet”? How do you suppose the government of Gaza proposes to exterminate the Jews of Glasgow? Or Chicago? Or Tehran, even?
I don’t think you are in any position to accuse others of having a “disconnect with reality”
Rob Saunders
” …they solemny swear to their desire to exterinate all Jews on the planet”
And you have a source for that, somewhere? They certainly don’t want Israel to continue as a country, and I dare say plenty of them would be happy enough to kill all the Jews in Israel (if they had been busy murdering and looting their way through my country for over 40 years I don’t suppose I’d shed too many tears either), but “all Jews on the planet”? How do you suppose the government of Gaza proposes to exterminate the Jews of Glasgow? Or Chicago? Or Tehran, even?
I don’t think you are in any position to accuse others of having a “disconnect with reality”