So why did Stephen Hawking think it was ok to visit Iran and China?

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?”

  1. shalomaleichem

    I have a simple question: What is the word we use to describe a person who distinguishes their response to certain actions according to the nationality of the actor? I don’t think its in any way controversial to describe Dr Hawking’s actions in this case as racist

    You might say this is merely inconsistent but when the inconsistency is such as Dr Hawking’s we should acknowledge that though this may be unwitting or lacking in malice it is nonetheless racist behaviour and he ought not to do it.

    I don’t much care whether the individuals in the BDS movement are aware of their biases- the bottom line is that they act on racist considerations. This is morally unjustifiable and they deserve to be called out on it even if they don’t like the truth.

  2. thomtownsend

    For you, is nationality always a synonym for race? Or only in this instance?

  3. shalomaleichem

    What do you mean its not expected that people take a morally consistent view? This logic legitimises every form of hatred.

  4. thomtownsend

    Again, worth reading the thread; actually reading all of it, because comments threads are a conversation. Look back to the first comment I made..I was unclear why we expected an individual to take a “morally consistent” approach to a sort of individual foreign policy regarding not visiting certain countries. If we did, we could get into a prolonged debate about visiting a great range of countries. I took the example of Mr Hawking’s visit to the US. He may disagree profoundly with much US domestic policy, but still chose to visit. This is unlikely to be labelled as morally inconsistent. I did not argue that “moral consistency” was, in all circumstances, not to be expected.

  5. shalomaleichem

    You say very matter of fact that maybe he wasn’t lobbied in advance of visits to these other countries.

    Does it not trouble you that the only lobby which vociferously advocates for a boycott on human rights grounds, ignores the world’s worst offenders in order to pursue the alleged crimes of a nation who have been persecuted in every country and age in which they have lived?

    BDS is demonstrably a racist campaign.

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