Nobel Peace Prize: Highly overrated?

“What is it with these Norwegians?” said the New York Post in an editorial. Once again, the Nobel Committee has awarded its peace prize to a winner who “hasn’t really done anything to earn it”—just as it did in 2009, when President Obama won only eight months into his presidency. This year’s winner, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, is working to find and destroy chemical weapons held by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Alfred Nobel stipulated that his prize should go to whoever “shall have done the most or best work” in promoting peace. The OPCW’s work in Syria has just begun, so why give them the prize now? “I know whom I would have chosen,” said Marc Champion in Bloomberg.com: Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Taliban for publicly championing girls’ education in the Islamic world. Despite more death threats, she has bravely carried on her campaign. Who can match her courage?

“Don’t be too disappointed,” said Jena McGregor in WashingtonPost.com. Malala is just 16, and since “this is not a fight she intends to end anytime soon,” she will surely win the peace prize one day. Besides, the OPCW deserved the prize, said Alastair Hay in CNN.com. Since the 1980s, it has convinced 190 countries to sign a U.N. treaty guaranteeing that they will not store or use nerve gases. And it was the OPCW that took the samples that proved that Assad’s regime had used the nerve gas sarin—leading to the agreement it is now enforcing. “We are all much safer because of the OPCW.”

Let’s be honest—the Nobel Peace Prize is overrated, said Ryan Kearney in NewRepublic.com. “We spend exactly one day a year talking about it,” and quickly forget about the winners. “Can you remember who won in 2010? 2004?” To restore some prestige to the award, perhaps the Norwegians should stop handing it out every year, and save it for truly major accomplishments—say, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem, which would merit “a gold medal the size of a kitchen table.’’ The need to honor someone leads to mistakes such as the one the Nobel Committee made in 1973, when it gave the prize to a man who secretly oversaw the bombing of Cambodia and Laos. “I can only imagine the interest Henry Kissinger is still collecting on his prize.”

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