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
Has it really taken you this long to realise that Baltiron is out to lunch?
Rob Saunders
How could there be “fakestinians” or anyone else living in Israel in 1920 when Israel wasn;t invented until 1948?
Do you not realise what a total airhead you look, or do you simply not care?
Rob Saunders
Yes, well, China and Iran invest in science that isn’t purely for military purposes.
Rob Saunders
Well, the concert in Edinburgh that was disrupted was by the Jerusalem Quartet who proudly described themselves as “Distinguished IDF Musicians” and boasted of playing with a violin in one hand and a rifle in the other.The Israel Philharmonic (as in the London protest) doesn’t represent an institution but it could be argued that it is itself an institution. (In any case, no orchestra that refuses to play the music of Wagner because of his politics – remember this is someone who died 130 years ago – deserves any more respect than would one which refused to play Mahler becuase he was Jewish. You donlt have to be institutional to be vile.
chelyabinska
“Hamas that pledges to exterminate all Jews on the planet.”
Why don’t they target explicitly in their charter any Jews not occupying their homeland say in Canada or France?
Blind pro-Israeli puppetry is one thing the world doesn’t need. God knows there are more than enough clowns in Congress who pledge fealty, subservience, and loyalty to it.