I so appreciated this post — would add a couple of details. Onboard the MV Rachel Corrie is Denis Halliday, the U.N. man who was in charge of the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. He resigned, saying U.N. sanctions were “genocide.” He is not the type to be concerned about what the likes of Saddam Hussein do. Also onboard the Corrie is Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976. She and Betty Williams won for opposing the violence in Northern Ireland: It was a worthy award.
Maguire is an old anti-Israel hand. She accuses Israel of running an “apartheid system.” She was hit by a rubber bullet when protesting the Israelis’ security fence. She has made a pet of Mordechai Vanunu, the man who spilled Israel’s nuclear secrets: met him upon his release from prison. She accuses the Israelis of “ethnic cleansing.” Blah, blah, blah. You know the type: Maguire is hard-core, like Helen Thomas.
And her views of America are essentially those of Noam Chomsky. You can see this, hear this, in most any of her speeches. She even opposed the Nobel prize to Barack Obama, vociferously! She said, “Giving this award to the leader of the most militarized country in the world, which has taken the human family against its will to war, will be rightly seen by many people around the world as a reward for his country’s aggression and domination.”
And her co-laureate, Betty Williams? You may remember her from the George W. Bush years. In 2006, she told Australian schoolchildren, “I have a very hard time with this word ‘nonviolence,’ because I don’t believe that I am nonviolent. Right now, I would love to kill George Bush. I don’t know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize . . .”
A one-time deal, a crazed moment? Well, she performed an encore the next year, in Dallas, speaking to the International Women’s Peace Conference: “I mean, right now, I could kill George Bush, no problem. No, I don’t mean that. I mean, how could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that.” Big laughs — from her and the audience.
Charming, these Irish ladies who win the Nobel Peace Prize.