The Nobel Peace Prize goes, or should go, to those who embody the value of peace and strive for it even against the odds. Former winners include:
• Mother Teresa, the leader of the Missionaries of Charity who worked and cared for the poor in Calcutta, India;
• Jimmy Carter, former United States President, humanitarian and pursuer of international peace. His accomplishments include Habitat for Humanity and The Camp David Accords, which briefly brought peace between Israel and Egypt;
• Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist who led a peaceful protest fighting for equal rights among all Americans and fought for the end of the oppression of an ethnicity of American citizens.
All these winners had ideals for the betterment of the world and most took action to make it so.
President Barack Obama definitely has ideals of his own, but so far has been all talk and no action. This is normal for a politician who promised the world and could not deliver within the first year.
For those who do not believe me, an example of how he has not delivered is Guantanamo Bay. He promised to close the detention facility by January 2010, because he wanted to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.” On Sept. 25, the administration said they will not be able to meet this deadline.
Who did the Norwegian Nobel Committee, those responsible for picking the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, discard to award Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize?
Kristian Harpviken, director of The International Peace Research Institute, listed three possible candidates for the award.
“First of all, Pied Cordoba, the Columbian senator, who has played a key role in the release of hostages held by FARC guerrilla; secondly, the Jordanian prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, who has taken several important initiatives within the Islamic world [such as] the Common Word, a platform for reaching out to other world faiths; . and my third candidate was Sima Samar, the Afghan human rights activist, who is currently also the head of Afghan Independent Human Right Commission, as well as the UN special envoy on human rights to Darfur,” Harpviken said.
I cannot fault Obama for accepting the prize – if I was picked to receive the Nobel Prize, I would accept it too. This would not mean, however, I would be qualified for such an award.
The fault here lies with the committee who chose Obama, who has not lived up to his promises to change the world, over those who are actively changing the world and to act on what they think is right. This is not surprising though. In the past, this very same committee has chosen recipients who did not embody the ideals of peace over their competition. An example of this is when former Vice President Al Gore won the prize in 2007.
One of his contenders was a woman named Irena Sendler, a woman who lived in Poland during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. She is noted for saving 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, dodging encounters with the German government. She found non-Jewish families who were willing to adopt these children, giving them safe places to hide from the Nazis. She gave them false names and histories to keep them safe while recording their true names, family histories and cultures and burying the records in a jar so their true selves would be preserved.
Remember, Gore won for a documentary about global climate change. I believe saving lives from a brutal regime is, at least, a little more important than saving the world from rising carbon dioxide levels. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee saw otherwise.
The committee who awards this prize has a history of awarding people with certain ideologies and passing over the true heroes. Not only does this decrease the value of the award, but it demeans those who truly deserve it. No offense, Mr. President, but you do not deserve this award over many of the other candidates.
Ryan Green is a junior majoring in electrical engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].