We should, I suppose, be grateful that the Oslo Committee doesn’t decide on the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. If it did, it would hand the award to a tumor.
Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s euroskeptic UKIP, reacts to the news of the EU’s peace prize here, emphasizing the divisive effects, and anti-democratic objectives, of the Brussels project, as well he might.
Ekatherimini reports on other reactions: amongst the unimpressed, the following:
”Is this a joke?” said Chrisoula Panagiotidi, 36, an Athens beautician, laughing derisively upon hearing that the European Union had won the Nobel Peace Prize…Petr Hajek, deputy head of the office of Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who once supported the EU but has since turned against it, said the EU lacked ”democratic legitimacy” and was contributing to ”animosity among nations”… In Bosnia, which hopes to join the bloc but still remembers how a hesitant and divided EU stood by during its 1992-95 war, Kada Hotic called the award ”shameful”. Her son, husband and two brothers were among 8,000 Muslim men and boys massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.
I spoke to a couple of Norwegians about the award this morning. They just rolled their eyes at the news. As well they might.
Good grief.