The Horrible Hypocrisy of the Nobel Peace Prize

Hypocrisy of awarding Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi


The Nobel panel demonstrated the lack of foresight and thoroughly erred in choosing two personalities for a great honour.
VOICES | 5-minute read | 23-06-2017
Mumtaz BalkhiMUMTAZ BALKHI
Ordinary citizens are no experts to judge the merit of a scholarly work that qualifies to win the Nobel prize in medicine, physics, chemistry, economics or literature. However, they can certainly judge the merit on which the "Nobel Peace Prize" is conferred.
Especially, for the contributions made towards achieving peace, protecting the rights of the poor and the most vulnerable and supporting the struggles for achieving just political and economic aspirations.
Therefore, I consider the Nobel Peace Prize to be sacred - it must be awarded after thorough scholarly reviews. Clearly, on two occasions, the Nobel Peace Prize committee demonstrated the lack of foresight and thoroughly erred in choosing two personalities who do not even remotely deserve any peace prize, let alone the greatest of all.
The two personalities are Myanmarese politician Aung San Suu Kyi and former US president Barack Obama, who were awarded the prized Nobel for peace.
Take the case of president Obama. It was during the 2008 US presidential elections that my former mentor at Johns Hopkins University at Maryland had just returned to her office after voting for Obama.
Obama did not relent from killing Syrians even in the last days of his presidency, 
The reason she gave for favouring Obama over Republican presidential nominee John McCain was: "If we do not vote to oust Republicans from power, there will be no end in sight for the war in Iraq."
In other words, Obama's presidency was a premise of hope for achieving peace and stability in the Middle East and perhaps in Asia and Africa as well.
These regions have been plagued with chronic political instability, wars and famine - which, incidentally, were seeded during the colonial rule of British and French; more recently, flawed policies by the United States added to the chaos.
Contrary to expectations, what Obama did was more shameful than his predecessors.
During the eight long years of his presidency, Obama routinely and consistently signed orders for drone assisted extra-judicial murders of individuals living in the remote mountain regions of Afghanistan-Pakistan, East Africa and Yemen.
The murder of individuals without proof of guilt and evidence of crime amounts to killing the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize and humanity.
As if the drone assisted murders were not enough, Obama ordered a direct military campaign in Syria - not to punish its brutal dictator over the use of chemical weapons against civilians but against suspected militants fighting the dictator who, under Obama's watch, butchered hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced millions.
As a result, barely surviving and starving innocent women and children in Syria had to bear the brunt of US-led military assault. Obama did not relent from killing Syrians even in the last days of his presidency, which he ended with a murderous assault on a camp in Syria's Idlib province - leading to the death of more than one hundred people.
It is noteworthy his justification for the killings had been "an imminent existential threat to Western civilisation".
And, who are those threatening the Western civilisation and way of life, who deserve to die without proof of guilt?
The answer is: an impoverished and famine-stricken people based in the inaccessible mountains and remotest corners of the old world and even nomadic desert tribes.
Let us take the case of another Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi. She was conferred the Nobel Peace prize for her consistent struggle against the military Junta for establishing a democracy in Myanmar.
It appears all her work for the foundation of democracy and peace in Myanmar was deliberately exaggerated by the Western media to the extent that it eventually backfired.
On many occasions and on record she appears to be expressing no visible urgency to stop the genocide of the minority Rohingyas. More shockingly, she repeatedly defended government policies and rejects the notion of the Rohingya genocide.
Under her administration, Muslim Rohingyas have suffered more killings and devastation. Thousands have been uprooted and forced to live under inhumane and horrific conditions in shanty camps, without access to health care and restrictions on reproductive rights.
Tremendous disrespect and disrepute was brought to the legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize and the world's consciousness when former US president Obama - an undeserving laureate - visited Myanmar in 2012 to re-establish diplomatic relations.
And, then in 2016, Obama invited fellow undeserving laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to his oval office and rewarded Myanmar by lifting long-held US sanctions. I want to present these facts to the learned Nobel committee so that they can judge on what merit was the two leaders were conferred the peace prize.
In order to maintain the sanctity of the revered award and the dignity of those who deserve to win it, the Nobel committee must demand the return of the prize from both Obama and Suu Kyi.

The True Cost For The Nobel Peace Prize (Daniel 4)

Former Ambassador: Obama Allowing Slaughter in Syria to Preserve Iran Nuclear Deal

5:45 PM, Aug 30, 2016 | By Jenna Lifhits

In an op-ed at the Atlantic Council, former ambassador Frederic C. Hof condemns President Barack Obama’s “passivity” during the bloody conflict in Syria, both on the battlefield and before the public eye, for the sake of preserving the Iran nuclear deal.
The administration’s failure to defend “a single Syrian civilian from the Assad-Russia-Iran onslaught,” he writes, “may well serve to define Mr. Obama—accomplishments at home and abroad notwithstanding—as a failed president.”
Hof continues, about White House press secretary Josh Earnest:

In his August 25, 2016 press briefing Mr. Earnest was asked about the administration’s failure to protect Syrian civilians in the face of what he described as the Assad regime’s “unconscionable use of violence against civilians.” He clarified, using language that defines vacuity, the administration’s policy as follows: “But our approach to the Assad regime has been to make clear that they’ve lost legitimacy to lead that country.” Claiming, in a sentence that defines wishful thinking, that “Russia shares this assessment,” Earnest suggested that the way forward toward ending mass murder is for Moscow to live up to its commitments and rein-in its homicidal client. He did not mention Russia’s own growing portfolio of war crimes in Syria.

In fact the administration’s policy toward Assad Syria (as opposed to ISIS Syria) rests on its desire to accommodate Iran—a full partner in Assad’s collective punishment survival strategy—so that the July 14, 2015 nuclear agreement can survive the Obama presidency. In the case of ISIS, Earnest noted with evident pride that the United States has put boots on the ground in eastern Syria and is at war with a loathsome terrorist group. In the case of offering Syrian civilians not the slightest modicum of protection from Assad, however, Mr. Earnest had an excuse evidently not applicable to ISIS: Iraq 2003.
According to Earnest, “We’ve got a test case just over the border in Iraq about what the consequences are for the United States implementing a regime-change policy and trying to impose a military solution on the situation.” Warming to the subject, Mr. Earnest went on to say, “And look, there are some people who do suggest that somehow the United States should invade Syria.”
Shame on a news media that consistently permits this dissembling to go unchallenged. Mr. Earnest, if asked, would be unable to name anyone counseling the invasion of Syria. Mr. Earnest would be unable, if asked, to explain why limited military measures designed to end Assad’s mass murder free ride—such as that offered by the 51 dissenting State Department officers—amounts to “regime-change” and “trying to impose a military solution.” Indeed, if challenged, Mr. Earnest would be required to retract his subsequent false claim that no critic of the president’s Syria policy has ever offered specific, operationally feasible alternatives to a catastrophe-producing approach.

Obama Nobely Apologizes For Just A Peace Of His Murders (Ezekiel 17)

U.S. claims drones only killed 116 civilians; experts say it’s way more

Journalists and rights experts say the Obama admin.’s report on drone strikes is understated and lacks transparency

Ben Norton

A Yemeni man walks past graffiti denouncing U.S. drone strikes, painted on a wall in Sana’a, Yemen on Nov. 13, 2014 (Credit: Reuters/Khaled Abdullah)

According to the Obama administration, just 64 to 116 civilians have been killed in its secretive drone program.

The U.S. government published a report on Friday, July 1 that claims that the counter-terrorism airstrikes it conducted outside of conventional war zones between January 2009 and the end of 2015 only killed scores of so-called non-combatants.

Experts say the number is likely much higher.

The report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, analyzes 473 U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the vast majority of which were carried out by drones. It says 2,372 to 2,581 combatants were killed in these attacks.

The U.S. government is not clear about how it defines combatant. The New York Times reported in 2012 that President “Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
For years, the U.N., Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized the U.S. government’s secrecy in its drone assassination program, and have even implied that the Obama administration may be guilty of war crimes.

President Obama touted the report on Friday as a sign of his administration’s commitment to transparency. Yet scholars, journalists and human rights officials who have long monitored the drone program are worried that the investigation’s findings are drastically understated.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been one of the leading forces in the documentation of drone casualties. In a statement, the organization noted that the U.S. government’s figures are a mere “fraction” of what its detailed research has found.

The organization used reports by local and international journalists, NGO investigations, leaked government documents, court papers and the results of field investigations to analyze the U.S. drone strikes that took place in this 2009 to 2015 period.

It found that at least 380 to 801 civilians were killed, several times more than the Obama administration’s 64 to 116 estimate. And this is still a conservative estimate, based primarily on cautious media reporting.

Salon reached out to Jack Serle, a reporter at the Bureau who specializes in the drone program.
“This data release is a welcome step towards greater transparency,” Serle said. “However, we still don’t have information on specific strikes, in particular several attacks that killed significant numbers of civilians, according to our monitoring. This makes it impossible to reconcile our civilian casualty figures with theirs.”

“The White House hasn’t even broken down the figures by year or by country, leaving us none the wiser as to how the drone war has progressed since the first strike of Obama’s presidency, on Jan. 23, 2009, killed at least nine civilians,” Serle added. The new U.S. president accepted his Nobel Peace Prize just the month before this attack.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism published an article on Friday in response to the new report, detailing its findings and methodology and comparing them to those of the U.S. government.

Human rights officials

After the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its report, President Obama also issued an executive order calling on the government to report on civilian casualties every year and to offer condolences to families hurt by U.S. strikes.

Human rights officials applauded the administration for the executive order, but still have numerous concerns.

Laura Pitter, senior U.S. national security counsel at Human Rights Watch, told Salon that she, too, is skeptical of the government’s casualty figures.

“It is very hard to assess the accuracy of their numbers because they are not broken down by year or even country,” she said.

“The U.S. has failed to explain who it targets and why, making it impossible to corroborate its casualty figures,” she added. “Unless details are provided on specific incidents, it’s not possible to determine if individuals killed were civilians, and thus whether the U.S. is complying with its own policy and with international law.”

Human Rights Watch conducted its own independent investigations into some of the U.S. drone strikes that took place in Yemen between 2009 and 2013, Pitter told Salon. The human rights organization concluded that more than 50 non-combatants were killed in these attacks alone, and this is a conservative estimate based on only a portion of the U.S. drone strikes that took place in one country.

The vast majority of U.S. drone strikes have taken place in Pakistan, not Yemen.
Pitter also pointed out that the fact that the U.S. government is providing a large range of civilian casualties, and not a specific number, indicates that it itself is not even 100 percent sure.
“It is hard to put much stock in them,” she said.

Secret government documents leaked to The Intercept by a whistleblower show that, according to official figures, 90 percent of people killed in U.S. drone strikes in a five-month period in provinces on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan were not the intended targets.

The Obama administration’s new report excludes drone strikes conducted in “areas of active hostilities” such as Afghanistan from its figures.