Paul S. Graham

Barack Obama joins a short list of Nobel Peace Prize recipients whose awards for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict were, to put it in the kindest way, premature. These include:

• 1994: Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority; Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister of Israel; Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel.
• 1950: Ralph Bunche, Professor Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Director of the UN Division of Trusteeship, Acting Mediator in Palestine 1948.

He also keeps company with mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who in 1973, was awarded the prize for negotiating the Vietnam War Peace Accord following America’s sustained attempt to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the stone age.

His Vietnamese co-recipient of the award, Le Duc Tho, declined to accept the prize because his country was not yet at peace. (The war still has not ended for an estimated 3 million Vietnamese who continue to suffer from the effects of Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used by the U.S. in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 that continues to contaminate the soil, water and people of the country.)

It is difficult to take the Peace Prize seriously. Obama’s award, the Nobel committee declares, is “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Tell that to Pakistanis who have to keep an eye on the sky to avoid being murdered in Predator drone attacks. Tell the Afghans; I’m sure they need a chuckle or two as they celebrate the eighth anniversary of the American invasion, also known to Obamaphiles as America’s “war of necessity.”

Obama’s Peace Prize truly is Orwellian:

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

– George Orwell: “1984”