In the War Between the Civilized Man and Arab Savagery, Stephen Hawking Chose the Latter

David Solway writes re Hawking's balking at a conference in Israel:

In a stinging article for FrontPage Magazine, Ari Lieberman points to the sharp distinction between the benefits and gifts that Israel has lavished upon mankind in science, technology and medicine and the deficits and depravities that are the legacy of the Arab world: barbarism, cultural regression, ignorance, religiously sanctioned violence and terroristic savagery. It is a distinction, we should have thought, that a world-class scientist like Hawking—who, incidentally, has visited Iran without uttering a single criticism of that rogue state—should be equipped to make but is clearly unable to do. One recalls his most celebrated theory, namely, that black holes leak radiation, but he cannot, it appears, register the lies, obsessions and hatreds that routinely leak from the black hole of the Islamic world—perhaps “gush” would be the more accurate word. (Of course, we need to make an adjustment here in the interest of precision: what are emitted from the Islamic world are not photons but, say, crepusculars, not particles of light, as in the original theory, but particles of darkness.)

Just goes to show that even a brainiac like Hawking can choose to embrace the darkness when it is presented as being the fashionable thing to do.