Trump’s Nobel Prize Hysteria

For the second year in a row Donald Trump flew into a rage when the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was announced — the prize he had long hoped to receive. In fact, in his meltdown, he even insulted the winner, South African jurist Navi Pillay, saying he had never heard of her. So is the American president’s ignorance of this remarkable woman a sin for which she owes his excellency an apology?

The citation for awarding the prize to Pillay stated it was in recognition of her efforts to achieve peace and her advocacy for victims. That is what the Nobel laureate did. So what about Trump? Whom has he defended his whole life? He has defended no one but those who hand him money, and sometimes he has taken the money and then betrayed his allies. How can he possibly call the Norwegian committee’s decision an “indelible stain” and declare that the prize has lost its credibility forever?

This deranged man is consumed by longing for the prize. The power and authority he possesses are no longer enough for him, so he now covets moral recognition too — just like his archrival Barack Obama, who won the prize right after taking office in 2009, before any of his merits or flaws had even become apparent. And although María Corina Machado, last year’s winner, gave Trump her own medal, his desire has not diminished, his anger has not been extinguished and he still clings to the hope of winning the prize. Surely every sane person in the world is astonished by the audacity and derangement of this man, who can be described quite simply as a war criminal and terrorist — one who did not hesitate to launch missiles at a girls’ school in Iran, crushing 168 girls and burying them beneath the earth in the city of Minab.

Perhaps what whets Trump’s appetite for the prize is that it has already been awarded more than once to murderers and butchers merely for offering victims a sip of water as they hovered between life and death. Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 — less than two years after the horrific massacre Kissinger orchestrated against the Cambodian people, which killed 150,000 unarmed civilians.

The absurdity of awarding the prize descended into pure farce in some years, as when they decided to split it between a peaceable and humble man, Anwar Sadat, and a hardened terrorist, Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun terrorist gang that carried out the Deir Yassin massacre. Another year, the prize was shared equally between Yasser Arafat, whose land was usurped, on the one hand, and the terrorist Yitzhak Rabin and his comrade Shimon Peres, perpetrator of the Qana massacre, on the other. It seems those who run the prize have no qualms about pardoning war criminals and opening a new chapter for them in life — as if Alfred Nobel intended the prize to attract and rehabilitate criminals.

And perhaps, because of the prize’s farcical nature, some of those who seek and crave it so fiercely are not men of peace, thought and justice, but war criminals who believe in taking what they want by force and by main strength.