The Nobel Committee has announced that Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi has won the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Unlike some Nobel Peace Prize winners, Ebadi is an example of what the Peace Prize should be about. Ebadi has been working for intellectual and personal freedom in Iran, directly challenging the Ayatollahs that control the country outside Iran’s nominally democratic system.
Ebadi said Iran’s most pressing human rights crisis is the lack of freedom of speech, and she urged the government to immediately release prisoners jailed for expressing their opinions.
She also said she hoped the award would send a message to the Iranian government, which has been accused of pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency has given Iran until the end of the month to prove it has no plans to produce such weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for generating electricity.
Ebadi is one of the many voices pushing for increased freedom for the Iranian people. It is important that these brave activists get the recognition that they deserve.
So who are the undeserving peace prize winners? Let me guess…Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter definitely. (Habitat for Humanity doesn’t make up for sleeping on the job through Afghanistan, Angola, and Iran.)
However, Yassir Arafat is the single dumbest move the Nobel Committee has ever made. Giving it to a terrorist-supporting genocidal anti-Semite is like giving a Peace Prize to Hitler.
ok, so Jimmy Carter’s unworthy. But I suppose George Bush-41 should be for instigating the first unfinished military campaign against Iraq….and spending the years following his Presidency skydiving and campaigning for his son.
Well, if I had my way, his failure to complete the liberation of Iraq would mean he is not worthy of the Peace Prize.
Seems like your oxymoronical criteria for determining peace prize winners is directly proportional to the number of people who surrendered to the barrels of their tanks. Certainly war is a necessary evil on many occasions, but wouldn’t it be just a little contradictory to declare that he who spilled the most blood this year, whatever his endgame may be, is the most qualified practitioner of peace on the globe?
And here we have an example of why liberals can’t debate. On what logical grounds would you make that claim. I’ve so far said that Jimmy Carter should not have received the Prize because of his poor record on foreign policy (ignoring Soviet aggression in Angola and Afghanistan and sleeping through the Iranian Revolution of 1979). I’ve also said that Yassir Arafat should not have recieved the Prize because he is a terrorist and a virulent anti-Semite. I’ve also said that George Bush should not have recieved it for leaving the Iraqi people under the bootheel of Saddam Hussein.
That may let you make some inferences of what I think doesn’t qualify someone for winning a Nobel Peace Prize, but to use that as the basis of a conclusion that I think military action is the sole qualification doesn’t even remotely make sense.
Not only that, but it contradicts my statement of support for Ebadi, who has never even been in the military.
My criteria for who is deserving of a peace prize is based on who has done the most to challenge tyranny in society – which could be Gandhi, Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel, or Ronald Reagan. It has nothing to do with military engagements, although that could be one of the criteria involved.
In other words, you’re pulling an attack out of your ass and engaging in a childish straw man attack which I’ve just easily refuted by showing that you’ve misrepresented the argument and substituted one of your own.
I think we’re forgetting, just like everyone else, who also won that peace prize with Arafat…