Over time, the “nobel peace prize” has become a joke. A bad joke. An anti-Semitic joke.
This same prize was once given to career Jew hater/murderer yasir arafat. But at least with arafat, it can be pointed out that this was a joint award with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing a peace deal, the Oslo Accords.
And now? The latest recipient of this award is navanethem “navi” pillay.
What do you know about navanethem “navi” pillay? Given that it may not be very much, I’ll let hotair.com’s David Strom tell you:
So who is this outstanding exemplar of human rights advocacy? Why, she’s a South African judge who put together the case for prosecuting Israel at The Hague, of course. She’s the first nonwhite woman on South Africa’s High Court, and later a judge on the ICC Appeals Chamber from 2003–2008. After that, she served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. In 2021, she chaired the UNHRC’s open-ended Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory.
It all sounds so NGO-y, doesn’t it? There are all the right words, and all the proper saccharine sentimentality that works perfectly to launder the raw hatred for Jews that lies just underneath the surface.
It was all a sham, and we can know that her role at the “Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory” was a sham because, before she was appointed, she had already rendered her opinion. Before taking the chair in July 2021, Pillay signed a June 2020 manifesto calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel” and a June 2021 letter urging Biden to punish Israel. She took the supposedly impartial job a month later.
And, from Strom’s commentary, here is the take of Elie Weisel’s son, Elisha Weisel:
On December 10, 1986, I was 14 years old, sitting in Oslo City Hall as my father, Elie Wiesel, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. I will never forget the look of hope on his face that day. He had spent his life tortured by the thought that the world had looked away from the Jewish people as the Nazis filled the gas chambers and crematoria with our brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, children. Finally, he felt seen, and he had a message to share. As he put it in his acceptance speech, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” My father was honored because he had turned the memory of genocide into a moral duty to the living.
This morning, the same committee awarded the same prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the UN commission of inquiry that, on September 16 of last year, betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel. Her commission held Israel to impossible moral standards demanded of no other sovereign nation defending itself from attack. The decision followed years of anti-Israel advocacy by Pillay, including signing a manifesto in 2020 calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” Others have been able to see Pillay for who she is. In 2022, for example, Berlin’s mayor withdrew her support from an event honoring Pillay with a peace medal. The event was subsequently canceled.
The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.
THAT is who navanethem “navi” pillay is. And that is what the nobel peace prize, once a huge honor, has become; a pathetic, hate-rewarding joke – as long as the hate is directed against Israel.
I would call it shameful, but that would be a waste of effort since, like the similarly self-destroyed United Nations, when it comes to Jews and Israel it has no shame.
May Israel get past this hatred and – as it has so many other times in the past, prevail.
