Tuesday, October 13, 2009              

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

SIR: The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is arguably one of the most absurd awards that the Nobel committee has ever made. Highly patronising as it is, it will be received with incredulity around the world. In fact there has rarely been an award that has been so obviously partisan and political in its intention.

The award is apparently an encouragement to America's first black president and a way of saying we hope that there is going to be a new direction in Washington's policy. However, all of this undermines the point of a Nobel Peace prize.

Obama has only been in office since the beginning of the year and while his foreign peace aims are noble, his achievements are rather few. He has done nothing in the Middle East and nothing to improve relations with the Russians.

In his own homeland he has actually undermined peace by becoming the most pro-abortion President ever to be elected. Former Nobel winner Mother Teresa once said that "the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion."

To award a prize simply on hope suggests a naivety and a blindness that I think will only damage the value of the prize and diminish its value to all its previous winners.

Tom Richardson,
Johannesburg, South Africa