So the Nobel Awards for 2009 have come and gone.
US Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Hussein Obama – who was nominated for the prize within mere days of taking up office – arrived in Oslo, accepted the award and promptly left.
Obama said that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace”. That’s when the US itself is involved. However, it appears not to be a consideration he extends to America’s staunchest ally, Israel.
President Obama, whose very entitlement to the US presidency has been called into question owing to uncertainty over his country of birth, has come in for fierce criticism for accepting the Peace Prize when he has not actually contributed to peace.
Swedish journalist and commentator Per Gudmundson said on Swedish TV that President Obama makes as fitting a Peace Prize laureate as Yasser Arafat did – both have done equally little to advance the cause of peace, albeit in entirely different spheres. Arafat through decades of terrorist attacks on civilian Jews in Israel and around the world, Obama though ongoing and heightened military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively.
Here’s the speech Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Hussein Obama should have made in Oslo:
Dear friends of peace,
I am humbled by your gesture and vow to act in the spirit in which this signal honour was bestowed on me. If there is one lesson recent history has taught us, it is that of Northern Ireland. Decades of violence ended when funding for weapons and training dried up. As a result of international determination to strangle the supply of armaments to hate-mongers and violent terror groups, guns have been replaced by conference tables and very real progress has been made towards genuine, lasting peace. Friendship requires trust, and trust is based on mutual recognition of the other’s concerns and rights.
It is this same approach that I will apply now that I am in receipt of this, the greatest honour I have ever received. I have admittedly done nothing whatsoever to deserve it, yet, but I promise to live up to your expectations and to deliver on those expectations.
Here’s how I will do it: in Afghanistan and Iraq I will use military means to fight the hate-mongers and violent terror groups to a standstill. I will use the money from my Award to set up foundations for education so that future generations in these two war-torn countries see a different reality, a better future. I will above all else do absolutely everything it takes to proactively battle the supply of arms to these two fractured societies.
It is this very same approach I will adopt in that other Middle East hot-spot, the one that for so many decades has pitched the 50-odd Arab and Muslim states against the world’s sole Jewish nation, Israel. To paraphrase a former US President, read my lips: there will be an absolute stop to the supply of weapons to hate-mongers and violent terror groups. When the ability to perpetrate violence has been removed from the equation, the relevant sides will sit down and negotiate a solution. A solution that is a compromise. Because only a mutually agreed compromise will once and for all put an end to this conflict. A conflict that the community of nations has deliberately maintained as a running sore over a number of decades for reasons of political expediency.
Political expediency is at an end. From today the focus is on the human being. Whether Christian in Bethlehem, Muslim in Ramallah, Baha’i in Haifa or Jew in Jerusalem – the Nobel Peace Prize is going to sow the seeds for an approach that brings equal dignity to human beings across this conflict-ridden region.
Human dignity. For everyone. That means an end to Palestinian Arabs living in squalid refugee camps. It means full citizenship, and compensation, for all displaced peoples, both Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, as well as Jews from Arab lands. It means an absolute – and resolutely enforced – ban on arms shipments to all groups engaged in violence, as well as the financing of such groups by any means whatsoever. It means an unequivocal refusal to countenance a nuclear-armed Iran. That will not happen, for the simple reason that the Iranian regime has clearly announced it intends to erase a fellow member of the UN family, Israel, off the map. The UN is not Mafia family which countenances the rubbing out of other family members. It is supposed to be a family of tolerant nations that enshrine mutual respect. If this kind of family is not to your taste, you’re welcome to leave.
And it means, finally, the immediate and absolute ban on all further state-sponsored interference in the affairs of other sovereign nations. This means – and I spell it out very clearly – the total and absolute cessation of government funding of subversion within Israel. The Israelis and their Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians, need to have sufficient peace of mind to work out their differences without outside interference. I am absolutely convinced that without the interference and active subversion of nations such as Sweden via a plethora of “NGOs” – activities that only serve to preserve and extend the atmosphere of mutual distrust and conflict – the Israelis and their Arab neighbours will come to an agreement that meets the widest possible consensus. Not everybody will be satisfied, but the majority will – on all sides.
However, that requires an end to subversion through the use of state-funded organisations that really serve as the extended arm of various nations’ covert foreign policy aims.
That has got to stop. No more covert interference from outside.
While I am here in Oslo, allow me therefore to spell it out clearly for your Swedish neighbours: no more use of Swedish tax revenues to fund disparate organisations such as SIDA, Diakonia, Palestinagruppen, Palmecentret, the Swedish Church and their obsessive meddling in the Middle East. Swedish foreign policy should be conducted openly and transparently through its Foreign Minister. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has used his time and energy and his nation’s considerable resources to try and persuade the entire EU to push through the division of Jerusalem. Some observers may find it remarkable that the EU would actively support partition in one city while celebrating the 20th anniversary of reunification in another city, Berlin.
However, while the drive to partition Jerusalem may be cheered in certain quarters and abhorred in others, it is nonetheless the openly declared policy of Sweden, through its Foreign Ministry, and as such perfectly legitimate. It is a policy that can be contested in many forums, and doubtless will. What is not legitimate, however, is for the Swedish Foreign Ministry to extend its reach under the table by employing a web of subversive organisations, providing massive government funding for the execution of an invisible policy. To give one single example, Sweden’s extremist Palestinagruppen, with membership totalling just 800 or so members, gets government grants totalling in the region of 5.5 million US dollars, which it uses to fund anti-Israel operations both in Sweden and in Israel. Sweden is of course far from the only c
ountry engaged in this subversion. Many European and other countries pursue an active strategy of parallel yet invisible foreign policy via various NGOs.
This will stop.
Today I received the Nobel Peace Prize, for which I offer my heartfelt thanks. It is an award that brings with it serious obligations. I intend to live up to the obligations that came with this award – I will promote peace. Robustly.
Because sometimes, promoting peace requires going to war.
If you are engaged in subverting peace, I put you on notice.
I am Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Hussein Obama, and I am prepared to go to war to ensure peace. Because the instruments of war have a very real role to play in preserving the peace.
I will go to war to preserve peace because I hold human dignity dear.
Thank you for you attention.
Barack Hussein Obama
NGO Monitor: Promoting Israel’s isolation
NGO Monitor: Lawfare
Gerald Steinberg: European Funding
Barbara Sofer: Letter to the Swedish Foreign Minister
Manfred Gerstenfeld: Behind the Humanitarian Mask
Jerusalem Post: Raising funds for Hamas on US campuses
JCPA/Dore Gold: Europe Seeks to Divide Jerusalem
IPT: Radical Movement’s Leader Forecasts America’s Demise
Honest Reporting: UNRWA Perpetuating the Misery
Spectator/Melanie Phillips: An Inconvenient Truth
Spectator/Melanie Phillips: Spot the Difference
Daniel Pipes: Sheikh Obama and his Two Wars
GLORIA/Barry Rubin: Radical Islamism
Isi Leibler: Candidly Speaking: Europe Has Forsaken Israel
Israel National News: Sweden’s Radical Anti-Israel Programme
Ilya Meyer: The Swedish Foreign Minister’s Crusade Against Israel
Ilya Meyer: EU Buys Swedish Votes