A small town in southern France has deiced to name a new road after Yasser Arafat, the arch-terrorist whose gun and holster on his hip earned him the Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Oslo Accords that morphed into the Oslo War in 2000.
Several people opposed the move and complained that Arafat was a “terrorist,” according to the Nice Matin newspaper, but La Seyne-sur-Mer Mayor Marc Vuillemot told the newspaper:
There is also a Yitzhak Rabin-street in the district. To my knowledge, the two men received the Nobel Peace Prize together.
Perhaps a different recognition could be calling a trench “Arafat Ditch,” but opposing the naming of a street after a Nobel Peace winner indeed would be absurd, almost absurd as the entire Noble Peace Price industry.
President Barack Obama received the Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year after having seen elected as President. The Nobel Prize committee explained it granted him the honor for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people” and for promoting nuclear non-proliferation and a “new climate” reaching out to Muslims.
It is amazing how much he accomplished while sitting in the White House for eight months.
The five people who the Nobel Committee that decides who wins the price are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, which says everything you need to about the agenda of the organization based in Oslo, the home of the “peace” agreement that Arafat signed and eventually scuttled to launch what is popularly called the Second Intifada but also is known as the Oslo War.