A New York Times article entitled Nobel Peace Prize: A Growing List of Questionable Choices states that the actions this month by the Nobel-winning prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, who is involved in a civil war in his country, has “reinforced doubts about the Nobel committee’s thinking and secretive deliberations.”

Furthermore, the article says, Abiy is not the only one who has been proven unworthy for the Nobel: “At least six times in recent decades, the Norwegian committee that awards the annual prize has picked recipients whose actions and behavior — either before or after the honor was given — have been viewed as unworthy or in some cases even absurd.”

The article lists the six examples of the Nobel Committee’s “questionable choices,” including the above-mentioned Abiy, former US president Barack Obama, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin, and three others.

The “questionable choice” of Obama’s win is obvious to all. He won the Nobel early in his first term as president before he actually even had a chance to attempt to achieve world peace. In fact, in his upcoming memoir, A Promised Land, Obama wrote that when he learned he had been selected, he asked: “For what?” Furthermore, the article states, Obama certainly didn’t deserve a Nobel Prize as during his presidency he approved an increase of US troops into Afghanistan as well as an expansion of the US drone strike program.

Regarding Arafat, Peres and Rabin, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for “their efforts to create peace in the Middle East” through the Oslo Accords, the article doesn’t mention the fact that Arafat was an arch-terrorist, known as the “Father of Modern Terrorism” and chairman of the PLO, an organization with a goal of Israel’s destruction by any means, including hijacking airplanes, kidnapping and murdering Olympic athletes, raiding embassies, attacking schools and of course murdering hundreds of people, including children. Nor does it mention the 279 men, women and children killed in 92 lethal attacks by Palestinian terrorists since the signing of the Oslo Accords.

What it does say is that: “efforts since [the Oslo Accords] to resolve the conflict have repeatedly faltered, punctuated by bouts of violence and bitter recriminations. Doubts about a proposed two-state solution have only intensified in recent years, amid threats by Israel to annex territory in the occupied West Bank.”

The silence is deafening.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)