How Noble is the Nobel Peace Prize?

Latheef FAROOK

President Barack Obama who promised peace but prosecuting wars was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize almost nine months into the office and hardly any achievement to speak of.

The Oslo based Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said that only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world attention and given its people hope for a better future.

I am sure, if Thorbjoern Jagland and his committee members, live in the same planet where we live they would realize that the world is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history due to a borderless global war unleashed by Obama, together with Europe and Israel, threatening humanity.

President Obama's agenda is far more effective in military escalation with reinforcement of military presence all over the world, developing new advanced weapons systems on an unprecedented scale and, together with NATO, directly threatening Russia, China and Iran.

Under the Obama administration Iraq remains occupied and bleeding, Afghanistan, raped and ravaged for 30 long years by Russia, the United States and Europe, is turned into a slaughter house, the Guantanamo torture prison continues to function while rendition and assassinations still occur.

Going a step further, Obama started a new war in Pakistan where more than three and half million innocent people have been displaced while drone attacks and killings remain a daily occurrence.

In the Middle East Obama is continuing the established US policy of talking peace, hoodwinking the Palestinians, helping Israel to grab more Palestinian lands, establish Jewish settlements with American tax payers money, consolidating Jewish grip on occupied East Jerusalem and other Palestinian territories.

He has ignored the Israeli suppression and brutalization of Palestinians and the Israeli economic blockade of Gaza where more than 1.5 million Palestinians were made to live under sub human conditions described by many top UN officials as genocide. Obama remained mum on the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza

The Obama administration blackmailed and threatened Mahmoud Abbas to betray his own people and go along with the US and Israeli designs to scuttle the United Nations Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes on the defenseless and starving Palestinian population in Gaza. The Obama Presidency has expressed its unbending support for Israel and the Israeli military and increased military aid.

Obama is threatening military strikes on Iran for enriching uranium. However he has assured Israel, reported to be possessing more than 200 nuclear warheads, that it would not be pressured into accounting for its nuclear arsenal or signing the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, (NPT). Thus he has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.

Obama failed to hold to account the Bush regime for all its crimes against humanity and allowed war criminals to go scot-free. Instead those neo cons who committed these atrocities remain an integral part of his administration and its war machine. Under the circumstances granting the Nobel 'peace prize' to Obama erases the war crimes committed both by the Bush and Obama administrations, provides a human face to invasions, legitimacy to an unprecedented escalation of US-NATO led military operations under the banner of peacemaking, military occupation of foreign lands, the relentless killings of civilians in the name of 'democracy' and demonize those who oppose US military intervention.

Reacting in disbelief Republicans tried portraying Obama as unworthy. In an official statement, Chairman of the Republication National Committee Michael Steele said, the real question Americans are asking is, what has President Obama actually accomplished? Some Republicans said he had won more for his star power and oratorical skills than for his actual achievements while some Democrats privately questioned whether he deserved it. The reaction inside the administration was one of restraint, perhaps reflecting the awkwardness of winning a major prize amid a worldwide debate about whether he deserved. Within hours after the announcement of the Nobel Committee decision Obama met with the War Council.

Expressing his deep disappointment in an article in The Guardian on October 10 well known American political analyst Howard Zinn had this to say;

"I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a President carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes despite the wars they waged and blood spilled.

"The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures and ignoring blatant violations of world peace."

"People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

"The Nobel Peace Committee should retire and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric and which has some understanding of history," said Howard Zinn.

This is not the first time such a decision was taken. For example, the Nobel Prize was also given to Menachem Begin, leader of the Zionist Jewish terror group Irgun, soaked in Palestinian blood especially those 254 men, women-22 of them pregnant- children and the old he slaughtered in Deir Yassin, a village West of Jerusalem.

Despite his crime record, he was elected as Prime Minister of Israel. He later invaded Lebanon and massacred, in Sabra Shatila, nearly 3000 Palestinians refugees whose lands the Zionist robbed to establish their state of Israel.

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist, who invented dynamite, set aside in his about $9 million to establish the Nobel Prizes to honour men and women from all over the world for their outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for work in peace.

The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, remain the most honoured prizes in the world. The question today is how noble is the Nobel Peace Prize.