Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 11 October 2024. © Richard Kemp
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner is being announced on Friday. Like so many other once-respected institutions, the Norwegian Nobel Committee appears to have been roundly captured by Left-wing wokeism. What seems to have seized the committee’s imagination in 2024, at the height of war in the Middle East, with peace nowhere in sight? The anti-Israel movement of course. It is all so sickeningly predictable.
The only surprise is that Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar and Iran’s supreme aggressor Ayatollah Khomeini are not on the list of potential winners, or perhaps a posthumous nomination for the late unlamented Hezbollah murderer-in-chief Hassan Nasrallah.
But the next best thing, the organising committee seems to have wheeled out UNRWA. That is a direct affront to all those Israelis and Palestinians who have suffered under the UN agency’s malignant role as effectively an adjunct to Hamas. UNRWA schools have helped indoctrinate and incite generations of Palestinian children to hate and attack Jews. UNRWA facilities of all kinds have housed Hamas armouries, missile launch points and command posts.
Meanwhile, some UNRWA staff were active participants in the murderous invasion of Israel on October 7. How is it possible that UNRWA can feature on the list of potential peace prize winners when many nations were so disgusted by its activities that they withdrew funding?
A reported nomination for the International Court of Justice adds insult to injury. The ICJ has jumped on the bandwagon with its obscene indulgence of South Africa’s accusations against Israel of genocide in Gaza. The IDF’s well documented efforts to minimise civilian deaths show the opposite to what is alleged. Hamas on the other hand does have genocidal intent, both with its own actions on October 7 as well as the words of its leaders confirming the purpose set out in its charter to kill Israelis and Jews everywhere. Allowing itself to be used in this way as an instrument of political warfare against Israel would disqualify the ICJ from nomination for a peace prize in any sane world.
The UN and its Secretary General Antonio Guterres also reportedly feature this year as Nobel Peace Prize nominees. The UN itself has an impressive pedigree of anti-Israel bias, not least 155 General Assembly resolutions against the country since 2015, compared to a grand total of only 88 in relation to all other conflicts around the world.
As for Guterres, he was forced to ‘set the record straight’ last October after being accused by many of justifying Hamas’s atrocities, which he insisted ‘did not happen in a vacuum’. Following Security Council Resolution 1701 demanding Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the Lebanese-Israel border in 2006, the UN has had thousands of peacekeepers deployed there. Throughout that time Hezbollah’s presence has only grown, culminating in the firing of 10,000 rockets into Israel since October 8. So much for the UN’s achievements in bringing about peace in the region.
Many of us thought the Nobel Committee had hit an all-time low by presenting a peace prize to Barack Obama, seemingly for nothing more than winning a US presidential election. Then came the award to the EU whose non-existent function as peace-maker in Europe was resoundingly debunked when Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 and began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
These days of course it would be unthinkable for the Nobel committee to even contemplate an award for any Israeli leader. Lord Trimble, former first minister of Northern Ireland and himself a Nobel Laureate, put that to the test in 2020 when he nominated the Israeli prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu’s instrumental role in forging the first Middle East peace treaty in a quarter of a century was given short shrift by the Nobel wokerati in Norway.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
