Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, said today that President Obama “really ought to consider” returning his Nobel Peace Prize Medal immediately, including the “really nice” case it came in.
Jagland, flanked by the other four members of the Committee, said they’d never before asked for the return of a Peace Prize, “even from a damnable war-criminal like Kissinger,” but that the 10% drawdown in US troops in Afghanistan the President announced last week capped a period of “non-Peace-Prize-winner-type behavior” in 2011. “Guantanamo’s still open. There’s bombing Libya. There’s blowing bin Laden away rather than putting him on trial. Now a few US troops go home, but the US will be occupying Afghanistan until 2014 and beyond. Don’t even get me started on Yemen!”
The Committee awarded Obama the coveted prize in 2009 after he made a series of speeches in the first months of his presidency, which convinced the Peace Prize Committee that he was: “creating a new climate of…multilateral diplomacy…an emphasis on the role of the United Nations…of dialogue and negotiations as instruments for resolving international conflicts…and a vision of world free of nuclear arms.”
“Boy oh boy!” added Jagland. “Did we regret that press release!”
The Bolivian president and a Russian political leader have launched a joint effort to have President Barack Obama stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize.
As Forbes is reporting, Russian Liberal Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky released a statement Monday saying that the prize, awarded to Obama in 2009 for his work on nuclear non-proliferation, was hypocritical in light of recent missile attacks in Libya.
"These developments in Libya are another outrageous act of aggression by NATO forces and, in particular, the United States," Zhirinovksy'sstatement, which appeared in Russian, is quoted byForbes as saying. He went on to call the strikes part of a "colonial policy" with the goal to control Libyan oil.
Bolivian President Evo Morales echoed those sentiments. "How is it possible that a Nobel Peace Prize winner leads a gang to attack and invade? This is not a defense of human rights or self-determination," Morales, who is among of number of left-leaning Latin American leaders who have denounced the Libya attacks, is quoted by Digital Journal as saying.
The Nobel committee has been criticized both in the U.S. and abroad for its 2009 decision to award the prize to Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" only a few months after his inauguration. "The prize is coming a little bit early," Guenther Oettinger, leader of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, is quoted by Bloomberg as saying. "He's at the beginning of his work, not the end."
Other pundits were more severe: "Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and for that gets a prize, which is now worth as much as whatever prizes they are putting in Cracker Jacks these days," Rush Limbaugh told Newsweek. "The Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves."
SOURCE: www.SecretsOfTheFed.com & other sources including The Huffington Post.
