Al Gore is a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for having made a political, error-filled, alarmist documentary about global warming.
Never has the path from mediocrity to an esteemed prize been so short!
"Peace" has apparently now been redefined to include promotion of any political issue on the agenda of the left. Oh, sure, the proponents took a weak stab at making global warming sound like a war and peace issue:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."
And then there's this:
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, also called climate change more than an environmental issue.
"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
"The first climate wars." Puh-lease! It's not as if we have a shortage of real, actual, ongoing, violent conflicts and wars, currently killing thousands and tens of thousands, that need addressing. "Nomads and herders" and farmers are in conflict? How many dead bodies is that? How does it compare to the massive, ever-growing death toll of the worldwide Islamic jihad?
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the "conflict" in the Sahel that Egeland is referring to is yet another front in the global Islamic jihad. Check out this little tidbit for example:
Customs officials play a key role in security in the south, where groups of Islamist gunmen are believed to maintain links with bandits who run cross-border smuggling networks across Africa's Sahel region.
Or try this on for size:
Another geographical misfortune is that Darfur borders Chad and Libya. In the 1980s, Colonel Gaddafi dreamed of an ‘Arab belt’ across Sahelian Africa. The keystone was to gain control of Chad, starting with the Aouzou strip in the north of the country. He mounted a succession of military adventures in Chad, and from 1987 to 1989, Chadian factions backed by Libya used Darfur as a rear base, provisioning themselves freely from the crops and cattle of local villagers. On at least one occasion they provoked a joint Chadian-French armed incursion into pursuing them. Many of the guns in Darfur came from those factions. Gaddafi’s formula for war was expansive: he collected discontented Sahelian Arabs and Tuaregs, armed them, and formed them into an Islamic Legion that served as the spearhead of his offensives. Among the legionnaires were Arabs from western Sudan, many of them followers of the Mahdist Ansar sect, who had been forced into exile in 1970 by President Nimeiri. The Libyans were defeated by a nimble Chadian force at Ouadi Doum in 1988, and Gaddafi abandoned his irredentist dreams. He began dismantling the Islamic Legion, but its members, armed, trained and – most significant of all – possessed of a virulent Arab supremacism, did not vanish. The legacy of the Islamic Legion lives on in Darfur: Janjawiid leaders are among those said to have been trained in Libya.
So the Nobel Prize committee closes its eyes to the biggest source of real violence against innocent civilians in the world today -- Islamic terrorism -- and instead goes searching for debatable problems that haven't even demonstrably killed anyone yet, but might someday.
Is there nobody on Planet Earth who did anything more important to world peace this year than making a documentary exaggerating the threat of rising waters to New York City and polar bears?
I can think of one man who has worked hard, against difficult odds, to bring democracy to the Middle East -- which, in turn, may bring lasting peace to many nations. In fact, as a result of his tireless efforts, there are two new democracies in the Middle East already. Literally tens of millions live in freedom who not long ago lived under brutal tyranny.
The man I'm thinking of didn't just "raise awareness" of a possible future threat. He actually rolled up his sleeves and led others to change the world.
You know exactly who I'm talking about, don't you?
I hear the protestations already:
But he had to fight two wars to do it!
Right you are. But a policeman doesn't cease to be a "peace" officer just because he has to violently arrest and even kill criminals from time to time. He's still a peace officer and he's still a hero. Someone on this earth has to have the courage to stand up and actually knock heads when the occasion requires it. Otherwise, the world will soon be run exclusively by tyrants and thugs.
I hope Al Gore thoroughly enjoys his Nobel Peace Prize. Someone had to receive it. At least it wasn't given out to a terrorist this year.
But if the Nobel Prize committee continues down this path of handing out prizes to liberal politicians for promoting their pet issues, the Peace Prize will rapidly lose whatever luster it has. It's already looking a bit tarnished, hanging as it does around the necks of the dead terrorist Arafat and a living terrorist-coddler, Jimmy Carter.
The Nobel Peace Prize is losing its gravitas. It's no longer reserved for men and women who have toiled for long years and sacrificed greatly in the cause of peace -- the Mother Teresas and the Nelson Mandelas of the world. Now it's being handed out to men who have paid no particular price at all, and whose work has no particular relationship to peace -- simply as a political punctuation mark.
I still respect the Nobel Prize winners in other fields, such as physics and economics. But the selection of the Nobel Peace Prize winner seems about as fair, rational, objective, and impartial as a figure skating championship judged by Tanya Harding.
Update 1: Powerline has some relevant historical background, including prior dubious winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and the differences in the way the peace prize and other Nobel prizes are awarded.
Update 2: Pajamas Media has a fairly exhaustive roundup of blogger reactions.
THERE ARE SOME INDIRECT BENEFITS of this insult to all that is good and right in the world. They have challenged the fundamental idea that 'the truth shall set you free'.
The product that Al Gore is selling is not truth, but it masquerades as truth. Rather than promoting freedom, his message promotes massive economic waste, which will produce little or no detectable benefit. Gore's talk of a 20 foot rise in sea level is preposterous fiction. This prize for Gore increases the probability that trillions will be spent on the 'global warming' fantasy while many other worthy causes go begging.
NEVERTHELESS, THE BENEFITS ARE MYRIAD. If Gore now runs for president, he can be vigorously attacked about his 'inconvenient untruths', and that would do a lot to stop the spread of his foolish dogma.
This foolish prize also helps profile the Nobel Peace Prize committee as an enemy of human progress. By promoting lies as dogma, by creating false prophets, by promoting socialist values at the expense of common-sense capitalism, they help remind right-thinking people who live everywhere that the struggle for truth, justice, and liberty will not come easily. It never has, and it looks like it never will.
No authority can be completely trusted to speak the truth, and it is for this reason that authority must be continually questioned.
These moral high-grounding Scandinavians have shown once again how dangerous they can be, frozen into unworkable Marxist ideologies dating back to 1848.
Given the dangerous fact abuse of Gore, the UN, and the Nobel Committee, we must now rely upon ourselves to ensure that 'the truth will out'.
Posted by: DemocracyRules | October 12, 2007 at 01:22 PM