Why I’m with Hamas and the Taliban
Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Saturday, October 10, 2009
WHEN it comes to awarding US President Barack Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize, I’m with the Taliban!
The terrorists think it stinks (Hamas does, too) and I believe he shouldn’t have come within cooee of the purse.
The Nobel for Medicine is awarded on results, not to a recent medical graduate who aspires to find a cancer cure.
Nor is the prize for Literature handed to someone who has written the first paragraph of what they think will be a masterpiece.
That’s how it should be, but the Nobel Peace Prize Committee doesn’t live in the real world.
Look at previous winners such as Yasser Arafat in 1994.
The father of modern Middle Eastern terrorism was at least engaged in peace talks (he signed the Oslo Accords) though 15 years on nothing has really changed.
Or the 2001 award to former UN boss Kofi Annan, on whose watch possibly 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered.
North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho had the grace to refuse to share the 1973 award with Henry Kissinger, becoming the only nominee to reject the glittering prize. His scruples were genuine the communist North were planning their major invasion.
Obama, on the other hand, is still dithering about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan (he should), but he took the prize without a blink.
In office for less than nine months, Obama could have just moved into the White House after his January 20 inauguration, mere days before the Nobel nominations closed last February 1.
What has he done, then, to deserve anything?
The chairman of the prize committee, former Norwegian PM (coincidentally the only male on board) Thorbjorn Jagland said: ``We have on many occasions given it to try and enhance what personalities were trying to do.’’
When asked whether it was premature, he said: ``It could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond, all of us, I hope it will help him.’’
Sounds like Norway runs on the basis of handing out elephant stamps for encouragement rather than marking people on their performance.
Even the AP White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven, not known for her critical views on the Obama presidency, noted that it has actually barely begun.
“He won! For what?’’ she wrote. ``Work on the President’s ambitious agenda, both at home and abroad, is barely under way, much less finished.
“He has no standout moment of victory that would seem to warrant a verdict as sweeping as that issued by the Nobel committee.’’
As for peace, she noted that he is currently running two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cannot get a climate change bill through his own Congress.
If he was being graded, his scorecard would read: “Incomplete.’’ The award illustrates a number of serious problems that currently exist - not only in the Peace Prize process - but globally.
The principal flaw is the readiness to accept spin over substance.
Obama has promised the world but has not delivered anything significant.
His list of ``incomplete’’ projects includes the pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, already slipping behind and unlikely to meet his own January, 2010 deadline.
Then there are his others: his failure to bring home US troops from Iraq; his failure to deal with the real threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons; his failure to even lay the groundwork for a new peace initiative between the Israelis and Palestinians. As for a nuclear-free world, see Iran.
Then there is climate change, which he sees as a ``priority’’, unlike our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who sees the issue of man-made carbon dioxide as the biggest moral issue facing the world.
It seems highly unlikely that Obama will have anything to present to his fans on this issue in Copenhagen come December.
He could always call former US vice-president Al Gore to deliver one of his emotion-rich but fact-lite speeches on the topic, bearing in mind the Nobel committee awarded him a Peace Prize in 2007(in conjunction with the dodgy IPCC) for his claptrap.
The Nobel committee seems to be sending a politically correct affirmative action love note to the Left in the US and elsewhere, applauding voters for electing a black man, albeit, one who has kindled divisions in his own country to such an extent that his opponents are starting to protest against his policies with a vehemence which may one day equal that of Obama’s own more extremist supporters.
That Obama has marked his presidency by attempts to define down the power and global leadership clearly appealed to the Eurovision team, tired of America being the world’s greatest
nation and shamed by having to appeal to the might of the US to resolve conflicts that have been beyond the capacity of the UN, or the European Union or any other multilateral bodies to deal with.
But if an “E’’ for effort mark, or an “H’’ for hope, is going to win what was once the world’s most prestigious prize, it’s time the Nobel Committee was told of Wilson Tuckey’s efforts to broker peace in the Liberal Party, and Mick Gatto’s mediation efforts in Melbourne’s gangland.
We have plenty of Australians just as worthy of this award as the new chum in the White House.
