A number of people have won the Nobel Peace Prize for political reasons thus reducing the value of the coveted international award. If this is not so, how could a man like former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have won it?

 

Demonstrations were organized in various parts of the world to protest against Kissinger receiving the prize and instead attempts were made to try him as a war criminal. 

 

In its October 10 edition, The Guardian quoted a friend of Malala Yousafzai commenting on her winning the prize. He said: “I hope the world will stop talking about this girl. There are many other girls like her in Pakistan and in the rest of the world. Why don’t the Americans and the British talk about them?”

 

I will ask the same question: Why honor Malala alone and not other girls around the world?

 

For those who do not know her, Malala is 17 years old and has been awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. She is a human rights activist. She has condemned in her tweets the Taliban’s violations of the human rights of women by depriving them of the right to an education. She has also attacked the Taliban for killing their opponents.

 

Malala survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban in 2012. She was on a bus on her way home from school when the Taliban shot her in the head from a close range.

 

Extremist movements in the Islamic world are mushrooming, and they are specifically targeting women. A number of women have resisted  these extremist movements. They include, for example, the Kurdish woman fighter Arin Mirkan  who carried out a suicide bomb attack against a military outpost  of the so-called Islamic State near Kobane, the Syrian town on the Turkish border. 

 

The question is: What are Malala’s real achievements? There are a number of men and women who are human rights activists. Why has the Nobel Peace Prize been given to her and not to other activists?

 

I say this while thinking of the example of Tawakkol Karman, the Yemeni woman Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. We praised her to the skies when she won the award in 2011, but we have now come down to earth as a result of her terrorist ideological inclinations.  She openly supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. She also attacked the Egyptian army and its leader Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi who later became president of Egypt. She said she wanted to go to Egypt to join the Muslim Brothers in their sit-ins in  Rabaa Sqaure to support the calls for the return of ousted President  Mohammed  Morsi.

 

At this very time, Time Magazine chose her to be among the most revolutionary women in history! Yet when the Houthis started gaining power in her country, she did not make anything more than very timid and low-key statements against them when they stormed Sanaa and even her own house.

 

When Karman was awarded the prize, a Norwegian newspaper wrote what could be translated as: “The Nobel Peace Prize Committee should be composed of those with intellectual qualifications, international vision and worldly minds, not from the retired members of parliament who are mostly narrow-minded.”

 

Michael Nobel, grandson of Alfred Nobel, also  criticized the politicization of the prize which he said does not conform to his grandfather’s will.

 

Many laureates obtained the prize for political reasons. Barack Obama was surprised when he was declared a winner.  He had only been president for a short time when he won the prize. The justification was that he should be enticed to work hard to achieve world peace!

 

The coming days will give us answers about whether Malala deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, just as they gave us answers about Karman.