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?”
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
And it’s the Netanyahu that celebrated 9/11 as “Good for Israel”.
See my response above to your ludicrous fantasy about exterminating all Jews on the planet.
And the EDL (British Nazis) hate Hamas and wave Israeli flags.
Rob Saunders
Of course no Israeli PM has sent killers across the (non-existent border to “knife infants in their beds”. That would require the prave soldiers of the IDF to get up close and personal with their victims, something they only dare to do when using them as human shield. Normal operational practise is either long-range shelling, attack from the air or for variety, the odd bomb left outside a school.
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/12/20/idf.chikdren.killed/index.html
Rob Saunders
“On leaving the house they heard an infant cry and turned back and knifed it to death.”
Who witnessed that? Another family member? Oh,no, they were all dead already…er…um…..ANTISEMITISM!!!
Rob Saunders
He pointed out that Bloodworth either couldn’t be bothered to check the number of visits to Israel Hawking has made since his trips to China and Iran, or deliberately concealed the fact. and you stap your little foot, wave your magic wand, shout “Ad hominem!” and this reasonable fact becomes a “Nazi rant about the evil of the Jooos”.
Take your pathetic apologia for genocidal terror and shove it up your own ass, if there’s room in there along with your head