Noam Chomsky. Photo: Duncan Rawlinson.

Virulently anti-Israel critic and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky urged famed British physicist Stephen Hawking to boycott the fifth annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, The Guardian reported.

Chomsky, a leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, joined several leading British academics to urge Hawking to boycott the conference after hearing that Hawking initially accepted an invitation to attend.

According to The Guardian, in a letter to Hawking, Chomsky harshly criticized Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, calling them “collective punishment” and said that Israel “has a name for the promotion of its cultural and scientific standing: ‘Brand Israel.’ This is a deliberate policy of camouflaging its oppressive acts behind a cultured veneer.”