Obama's Undeserved Nobel Peace Prize

To say that I was shocked this morning to read the news that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize is putting it mildly. When I watched his his acceptance speech in which he proclaimed that he wasn't sure that he deserved it, I had to wonder why he actually believed that he did.

U.S. President Barack Obama says he is deeply humbled by the Norwegian Nobel committee for selecting him as the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize and will accept it as a "call to action.

He'll have to call it that because he definitely has not shown any actual accomplishments to date that would make him a contender for the prize based on results achieved.

It's not enough to call for an end to nuclear proliferation while you allow your closest Middle East ally, Israel, to continue to hide its nuclear weapons from the rest of the world while pushing for sanctions against a country like Iran which you only think might be developing them.

It's not enough to talk peace while you're racheting up the war in Afghanistan while placing withdrawal from Iraq on the back burner.

It's not enough to say you're going to close Gitmo as prisoners like child soldier Omar Khadr continue to rot away in your secretive gulag while you "study" the issue.

It's not enough to say you're discontinuing oppressive Bush regime policies when you're, in fact, embracing renditions, withholding torture photos, covering for Bush administration and CIA war crimes, supporting the suppression of foreign prisoners' rights, violating Pakistan's sovereignty with continued drone attacks, killing endless numbers of civilians, pumping up AFRICOM  and refusing to demand that the Israeli government end its apartheid against the Palestinian people while propping it up with weapons and billions of dollars.

It's not enough to give speeches with lofty rhetoric about your peaceful aspirations when your actions prove otherwise.

And that record certainly shouldn't have been enough for the Nobel Prize committee to have awarded Obama this honour.

The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian: Nobels fredspris) is one of five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
- Wiki

*****

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964.

Update:

I guess I've thrown my lot in with the terrorists. Now who does that remind me of...?