Stephen Hawking Boycotts Israel

by Kevin Barrett

 
Three of my favorite musicians –  Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, and Brian Eno – are boycotting Israel. And now one of my favorite scientists, Stephen Hawking, is joining them.
I wrote to Hawking a month ago asking him to take this step:

from: Kevin Barrett <[email protected]>
subject: please consider canceling your trip to Israel
April 7, 2013 9:18 PM

Dear Professor Hawking,
As a fan of yours  – I am among the many who bought, and the few who have read, A Brief History of Time – I am writing to request that you cancel your trip to Israel due to the genocidal policies and mindset of that pariah state.
Chris Hedges wrote, in his article “Gaza Diary,” of witnessing IDF soldiers luring children within range of their guns and shooting them for sport. A study by British Medical Journal confirmed that this is a common practice, and never punished: “Two thirds of the 621 children (two thirds under 15 years) killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound…Clearly, soldiers are routinely authorised to shoot to kill children in situations of minimal or no threat.” (British Medical Journal 10/16/04)
No other nation on earth shoots children for sport as a de facto national policy.
Well over 90% of Jewish Israelis approved of Operation Cast Lead. This is a symptom of deep-seated Israeli racism. A recent poll showed that half of Israeli teens say they wouldn’t want an Arab student in the classroom with them, and 30% say they wouldn’t want a student with special needs.
Israel will become a normal society only when the world forces it to change its ways. Please help accelerate that process by canceling your trip and speaking out about the need for change.
Best
Dr.Kevin Barrett

Stephen Hawking, who is obviously smart enough to see right through the media smokescreen of pro-Israel propaganda, is also apparently brave enough to endure the slings and arrows and whines of the Zionist flacks.
Noam Chomsky is another story.
The Guardian tells us:
“Noam Chomsky, a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, has said that he supports the ‘boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories’ but that a general boycott of Israel is ‘a gift to Israeli hardliners and their American supporters'”.
WTF?!
With “prominent supporters” like Chomsky, the Palestinians hardly need enemies.
How could boycotting ALL of the “occupied territories” – the territories illegally stolen in 1948 as well as those stolen in subsequent depredations – possibly be “a gift to Israeli hardliners” ? Since when is there any difference between Israeli “hardliners” and “softliners”? They all tolerate shooting children for sport. They all supported Cast Lead. They all want to let the 1948 genocide stand. They all are equally uninterested in peace with even minimal justice (i.e. right of return with compensation). And as Helen Thomas put it so beautifully, they all must GO HOME (and then apply to the Palestinians for permission to immigrate). What part of “go home” don’t you genocidal maniacs understand?
Chomsky is notorious for his mealy-mouthed, passive-aggressive, impenetrable double-speak on the subject of 9/11-anthrax – the issue that could put a quick end to Israel if the public is ever allowed to understand it. And he speaks the same way about Palestine.  Why?
Chomsky has confessed to being a Zionist from early childhood. He has never renounced Zionism. He still apparently thinks it was fine to invade Palestine against the wishes of its inhabitants, stage the genocidal massacres and expulsions of 1948, and create an illegal entity calling itself “Israel.” Chomsky thinks it only “became quite ugly later.”
So it isn’t that Chomsky is less intelligent than Hawking.
It is just that on this one matter, he has a whole lot less integrity.
 
 

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

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