NOBEL PEACE PRIZE COMMITTEE COMMITS CREDIBILITY HARA KIRI

Catchy title isn't it?

I wasn't planning on writing anything on Obama's win of the Nobel Peace Prize today given the extensive and mostly high quality of the coverage in the rational blogosphere (I'll link to some of these at the end of this post) but temptation got the better of me.

Actually I don't think that the NPP Committee (hereinafter "Committee") has in fact - with this award bestowal - committed ritual credibility suicide for the simple reason that one cannot commit suicide TWICE.

From my perspective the Committee's credibility demise dates back to its 1994 award of the prize to Yasser Arafat. Some readers of this blog (to the extent that any exist at all beyond my fifteen "official" followers) may have forgotten just what a venal monster Arafat was, so I'll do a short but hardly comprehensive re-cap of the crimes of this vicious little Nobel "Peace" Laureate.

Yasser Arafat formed Al-Fatah in 1959 and served as the Chairman of the PLO from 1969.

The PLO was an umbrella organization for several different radical Palestinian political/para-military terrorist organizations, of which Fatah was the largest.

Among the many terrorist activities attributable to the PLO over the years were:

• The 1970 Avivim school bus massacre by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), killed nine children, three adults and crippled 19.
• In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second-largest PLO faction after al-Fatah, carried out a number of attacks and plane hijackings mostly directed at Israel, most infamously the Dawson's Field hijackings, which precipitated the Black September in Jordan crisis.
• In 1972 the Black September Organization carried out the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes.
• In 1974 members of the DFLP seized a school in Israel and killed a total of 26 students and adults and wounded over 70 in the Ma'alot massacre.
• The 1975 Savoy Hotel hostage situation killing 8 civilians and 3 soldiers, carried out by Fatah.
• The 1978 Coastal Road massacre killing 37 Israeli civilians and wounding 76, also carried out by Fatah.
• The 1985 Achille Lauro Hijacking during the course of which Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jewish tourist was murdered by 5 PLO terrorists including Abbu Abbas.
  The PLO was sued for its role in the death of Leon Klinghoffer. The $1.5 billion suit was dropped when the PLO paid an undisclosed sum to Klinghoffer's daughters.^[1] The family founded the Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer Memorial Foundation in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League, which works to combat terrorism through legal, political and educational means.^[1]

Arafat wasn't just a terrorist, he was also an accomplished corruptocrat who kept his own people in abject poverty while diverting as much as $1 Billion Dollars to his personal accounts:

In August 2002, the Israeli Military Intelligence Chief alleged that Arafat's personal wealth was in the range of USD $1.3 billion,^[92]. In 2003 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted an audit of the PNA and stated that Arafat diverted $900 million in public funds to a special bank account controlled by Arafat and the PNA Chief Economic Financial adviser. However, the IMF did not claim that there were any improprieties, and it specifically stated that most of the funds had been used to invest in Palestinian assets, both internally and abroad.^[93][94]

However in 2003, a team of American accountants–hired by Arafat's own finance ministry–began examining Arafat's finances; this team reached a different conclusion. The team claimed that part of the Palestinian leader's wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion, with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands. The head of the investigation stated that "although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian taxes, virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people; it was all controlled by Arafat. And none of these dealings were made public."^[95

So, as I said before, the credibility of the Committee, at least from my perspective, is long dead. The subsequent awards of the prize to Jimmy Carter, the principle Western author of the brutal human rights abusing clerical regime ruling a now nuclear Iran; Al Gore, law school dropout, divinity school dropout and failed politician turned man-made global warming myth-huckster and snake oil salesman and now, Barack Obama, are just more dirt on the grave of the already credibility dead Committee. Or perhaps a better analogy: just more foul smelling gaseous emissions from the Committee's unburied rotting corpse.

Other rational blogs discussing this story:

Left Coast Rebel
SisterToljah
The Reaganite Republican
Not A Potted Plant
Michelle Malkin
Atlas Shrugs
Legal Insurrection
Hot Air
Track-a-'Crat