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?”
Ginger Beer
Israel is not an apartheid state – stop telling lies and making up statistics.
Now, we can bat this back and forth like this forever, or you could just accept that you’re wrong. My further silence on this issue should not be taken as a sign that this is not the case.
Andre De Angelis
Of course Israel is an apartheid state. Even the majority of Israelis acknowledge it as such.
It is you who is wrong, and your silence on this issue will indeed be taken as a sign that you agree Israel is an apartheid state.
Ginger Beer
Fine, think what you like, but it’s pretty clear I don’t believe your racist lies
Emmetgrogan
Hamas Charter covers all Jews worldwide. It crawled out of the same mindset as Wannsee and the final solution. Two state solution with a palestinian state? No problem with that, but Hamas could assist by setting up a crack suicide squad a la Monty Python …….Baltiron. I fear you are wasting your time trying to engage in debate with people that think suicide bombers are in some way ‘cuddly’. UNfortunately there is a red/brown alliance that spreads any form of nonsense as the truth about Israel. I just wish they would have the courage to admit their problem is with Jews, not Israel.
Emmetgrogan
Well as John Wesley noted, No man is beyond redemption. Perhaps the EDL have got something right. Incidentally theyre not Nazis. EDL was set up in response to Islamofascists attacking troops coming off deployment at Luton Airport. They have attracted some extreme right wing nutters from BNP and the remains of C18, the latter were sorely cheesed off at their ‘comrades’ in the UDA putting Israeli flags up on lamps in Belfast. Mind you the only reason they did that was to get in the faces of the REpublican types who were putting up ‘palestinian’ flags in their areas. Ive never understood the attraction for the republicans in the palestinian/muslim global struggle. They dont quite seem to have grasped that Hamas will close down all the Guiness shops if they take power (Powers whisky as well???)