Did you know it was a crime in Israel to call for a boycott of the Zionist state?
International understanding of the crimes of the Zionist state of Israel is becoming increasingly widespread, with the latest blow to the Jewish Supremacist state being the announcement that Professor Stephen Hawking has joined the academic boycott movement.
Professor Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Israeli president Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday.
Now it has been reported that he has pulled out of the conference in protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Hawking wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.
Hawking’s decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.
In April the Teachers’ Union of Ireland became the first lecturers’ association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.
In the four weeks since Hawking’s participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind.
In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.
Hawking’s decision met with abusive responses from Jews on Facebook, with many commentators hurling insults based on his physical condition and accusing him of “antisemitism.”
In 2011, the Israeli parliament passed a law making a boycott call by an individual or organisation a civil offence. Punishment for this “offence” can result in compensation liable to be paid regardless of actual damage caused.
It defined a boycott as “deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage”.
In other words, Israeli lawmakers, in their delusional supremacy, have decided that anyone who goes against them and the Zionist state, is automatically guilty of a crime.
