In his congratulatory message to President Obama upon being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli President Shimon Peres stated:
"Very
few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world
in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided all of
humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a
feeling that there is a Lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under
your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from
Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will
ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble
direction." [1]
Within days of the announcement for 2009's
Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-two time nominee, Mordechai Vanunu declined
the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:
"I
am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations. I cannot
be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres. Peres
established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in
Israel. Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping. He continues to
oppose my freedom and release. WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY
FREEDOM I NEED NOW." [2]
In
1994, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Peres were all awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for playing a part in achieving the Oslo Declaration of
Principles. According to the preamble of the DOP, peace was to be based
on mutual respect and reconciliation. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Alfred Nobel's
intention was to reward people with a moral backbone and he hoped to
create icons and examples to humankind. Here's hoping President Obama
seizes his Nobel Prize as a mandate from Oslo and also hold Israel
accountable for past sins of omission and obfuscations.
In
1963, when Vanunu was nine years old the Zionists came to his home town
of Marrakech, Morocco and convinced his Orthodox father to abandon his
general store and pack up the first seven of his eleven children for
the land of milk and honey. Instead, the Vanunu's were banished to the
desert of Beesheva. A few months later, Shimon Peres, then Israel's
Deputy Minister of Defense met with President John Kennedy, at the
White House.
Kennedy told Peres, "You know that we follow
very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region.
This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we
monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?"
Peres
replied, "I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce
nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."
Ghassan
Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said Palestinians
hope the prize "will provide an additional incentive" for Obama to keep
striving for an end to the decades-old conflict while Reuven Rivlin,
speaker of Israel's parliament, called the Nobel decision "very
strange." [3]
The Nobel committee "stressed that it made
its decision based on Mr. Obama's actual efforts toward nuclear
disarmament as well as American engagement with the world relying more
on diplomacy and dialogue." [4]
President Obama, is
now the third sitting American president to win the award, and his
peers include Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who won the Nobel for helping end
the Cold War which raged from 1945 to 1991, and Nelson Mandela, who
fought for the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
Instead of
repenting and abolishing nuclear weapons after the terrorism inflicted
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American government upped the ante of
nuclear insanity and thus bears the most responsibility for the
political conflict and economic competition that ensued during those 46
years.
The apartheid regime in South Africa existed from 1948
until 1994; but it was not until the late 1980's that the American
government got on-board with the over twenty years of a global call for
boycott, divestment and sanctions that finally brought that apartheid
system to its knees.
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