When Nobel Peace Laureates Meet
Malala Yousafzai tells Barack Obama what his drones are doing.
One of this year's two Nobel Peace Prize winners is Malala Yousafzai, a teenage anti-Taliban activist from Pakistan. Last year, when Yousafzai met a past peace laureate, she risked a little awkwardness by actually bringing up peace:
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama met in the Oval Office Friday with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakastani girl who was shot in the head on her school bus by Taliban gunmen for criticizing their rule, including banning education for girls….In a statement, the White House says the United States "joins with the Pakistani people and so many around the world to celebrate Malala's courage and her determination to promote the right of all girls to attend school and realize their dreams."
In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she's worried about the effect of U.S. drone strikes. (The White House statement didn't mention that part.)
"I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," she said in the statement. "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."
The Nobel Peace Prize has never had much to do with peace, and its record in that realm seems especially poor at a time when one Peace Prize winner, Obama, just entered a new war, and another Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter, is criticizing him for not going to war soon enough. Peace may not be Yousafzai's focus, but I'll take the small victory of the Peace Prize honoring someone who, even if only in passing, took an opportunity to tell a powerful person what his war was doing to her country.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Silly girl. How can you have peace without drone strikes to take out the evil men?
We must cleanse this world of evil, with fire and blood.
I can’t believe she won. How many elections has she won? How many vapid speeches has she made? How many empty promises? How many $50k per plate fundraisers has she held? None, that’s how many. What a disgrace to the prize.
As far as I can tell, she hasn’t even talked about getting rid of nuclear weapons, let alone done nothing about that once in control of them.
None, that’s how many.
Yet…none yet.
How many third world brown people on the other side of the planet has she ordered killed? None. What a disgrace indeed.
How many terrorist cells has she commanded? How many bombs has she thrown in cafes?
Its awarding the prize to people like this that are destroying the reputation of the organization that once recognized the sterling work Yassar Arafat did to promote peace in the Middle East.
Its organizations an people like the EU, (which has single-handedly prevented another Europe-wide war), Al Gore (for his fight to ensure that only rich people can fly in planes and have central heating), Maathi’s brave reporting on how the west developed and deployed AIDS to depopulate the African continent, Menchu’s ‘fake’but-true’ memoirs, and for Le Duc Tho (who got his award for simply agreeing to stop fighting after running a war for several years) that deserve the prize.
This is the baseline.
How many vapid speeches has she made?
Quite a few, actually, but I don’t hold it against her.
Last I checked this girl is widely despised in Pakistan ‘for making Pakistan look bad’. Outside of Sub-Saharan Africa I don’t know if there is a more degenerate society on Earth than you’ll find in Pakistan. So who’s joining with these people now?
Outside of Sub-Saharan Africa I don’t know if there is a more degenerate society on Earth than you’ll find in Pakistan.
Washington D.C.
Is it strange that I fear for her life more, now that she met the president, than before when it was just the Taliban?
Hopefully she won’t have to return to that shithole she’s from.
Yep, she has to ‘get in line’ for her visa and green card.
If she doesn’t attend any weddings (including her own) in the interim she just might live long enough to make it to the front of the que.
You mean DC?
“In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she’s worried about the effect of U.S. drone strikes.”
The heart of a progressive cannot be moved.
And yet it’s conservatives who bring us relentlessly to perpetual war
You say that as though there’s been reliably conservative people in government. As a conservative libertarian myself, I would have to say that the last “conservative” president we had was Ronald Reagan, and even then, he was lacking in many important ways.
It is far more reliable to recognize that the progressives in both parties are either eager to get us into war, or at best, are too incompetent to keep us out of it.
“Show me on the map where the bad man droned you.”
She’s Malala but he’s President Obama. Nice.
she told him she’s worried about the effect of U.S. drone strikes.
Word to the wise: if anybody invites you to a wedding, say no.
The Nobel Peace Prize has never had much to do with peace
Peace is… complicated. You wouldn’t understand.
It’s also nice to see it go to someone who’s not a TOP MAN (or woman) who can have people killed anytime and anywhere she wants.
Yeah, I think the Nobel committee engages in a lot of wishful thinking. If only we give them the prestige of a Nobel, maybe they’ll try to live up to it!
That only seems to work with Europeans. The British do something like that, too, when they grant a peerage to a former Prime Minister.
It does something to them psychologically. Grant them a peerage, and suddenly they stop sounding so much like a partisan and start talking about the common good–since they’re above it all now, don’t you know…
That shit doesn’t work on a progressive. You give a progressive a Nobel like that, and they just use it as cover for their evil work. How can you criticize ME?! Don’t you bitches know I won a Nobel Peace Prize?
It’s the Nobel Peace Prize, not the Nobel Pacifism Prize.
Not saying that Obama’s prize was deserved, but the slam on Carter is totally unjustified.
The fact you think Carter doesn’t deserved to be slammed says it all.
At least it’s less awkward than 2011 when Obama threw a state dinner for the government keeping Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo imprisoned.
Obama has never let the optics get in the way of his ego.
Yes, the right never had a state dinner for the Chinese when they held power in the US.
I really thought Putin had a chance. What a shame.
It would be nice if Pakistan stopped harboring nazi genocidal thugs like Osama Bin Laden who’ve done such terrible things in MY country
It would be nice if Pakistan stopped harboring nazi genocidal thugs like Osama Bin Laden who’ve done such terrible things in MY country
I once heard someone say that the original purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize was to award it to the person who had done the most to eliminate standing armies throughout the world. This person then went on to say how unreasonable a goal that was, and that Nobel’s desire was rather loony.
The funny thing is, though, that Nobel’s goal is rather attainable: you arm civilian militias to the teeth (ok, well, maybe just a rifle, a pistol, and a knife, and the training to use them), and then you disband the standing army.
If I became President, for example, I would declare to the world: We will be pulling out of your countries in four years. Leading up to this time, we will provide a rifle, a pistol, and some training, to every civilian willing to accept them. It is your privilege to decide whether or not it will be legal for your civilians to accept this training, but it matters not to us, because we’re going to be gone in four years.
If I could do that, I would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize! But I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to calculate the probability that I’d actually receive the Nobel Peace Prize. (Hint: it will probably rhyme with “hero”.)