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Not Nobel Winners (Excellent Read)
Opinion Journal ^ | 10/14/07 | WSJ Editorial

Posted on 10/14/2007 9:32:01 AM PDT by shortstop

In Olso Friday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country's military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.

The prize was also not awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year while protesting peacefully against dictator Robert Mugabe.

(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: algore; divinityschoolbomb; divinityskooldropout; lawschooldropout; nobelprizefarce; opinionjournal; predictions; realheroes; wsj; zimbabwe
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To: shortstop

bump for publicity


21 posted on 10/14/2007 10:26:51 AM PDT by VOA
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To: shortstop

I don’t understand. How would the awarding of the prize to anyone on that list poke President Bush in the eye. Isn’t that the point of the prize nowadays?


22 posted on 10/14/2007 10:27:52 AM PDT by Timocrat (I Emanate on your Auras and Penumbras Mr Blackmun)
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To: CodeToad

. They are a political organization pushing communist ideas and AlBore fit thier mold. Gore and Arafat share a common prize. That doesn’t say much for Gore or the prize.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Well, dangit doc, it don’t say a whole heck of a lot for Arafat neither!


23 posted on 10/14/2007 11:11:02 AM PDT by RipSawyer (Does anybody still believe this is a free country?)
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To: CodeToad

. They are a political organization pushing communist ideas and AlBore fit thier mold. Gore and Arafat share a common prize. That doesn’t say much for Gore or the prize.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Well, dangit doc, it don’t say a whole heck of a lot for that there Arafat feller neither!


24 posted on 10/14/2007 11:11:57 AM PDT by RipSawyer (Does anybody still believe this is a free country?)
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To: shortstop

> Kinda puts Algore’s farce of an award in proper perspective, doesn’t it?

The Inventor of the Internet has now won the Nobel Peace Prize. Whodathunkit? And he managed to do it by dreaming up this decade’s Y2K-scam, Global Warming. And like Y2K it is going to cost the world Billions of Dollars to achieve precisely nothing...

...and *this* is the man who was nearly POTUS. It just goes to show that about half of the US population are stark-raving bonkers. God Bless the Sane Half!


25 posted on 10/14/2007 11:13:35 AM PDT by DieHard the Hunter (Is mise an ceann-cinnidh. Cha ghéill mi do dhuine. Fàg am bealach.)
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To: mware
“I guess he will have to be satisfied with become a Saint and saving millions from communism.”

I imagine if he had delivered these people into communist tyranny he would have received the prize.

The arrogant ignorance of the gorbots is unprecedented. These people either have a lot to gain ($$$) from the lie, or they are too ignorant to know better. Either way - dangerous.

26 posted on 10/14/2007 11:14:14 AM PDT by Constitutional Patriot (Socialism is the cancer of humanity.)
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To: Hunton Peck

There are at least three billion people more worthy of a peace prize than algore. And that’s a cautious estimate.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Downright timid, I’d say!


27 posted on 10/14/2007 11:14:40 AM PDT by RipSawyer (Does anybody still believe this is a free country?)
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To: jackibutterfly
"What DOES global warming have to do with peace, anyway?"

Something about the coming climatic disaster will cause massive ecological damage and increased human migration, leading to more competition for increasingly limited resources, and thus the potential for future conflict. Or at least that's what the committee said.

28 posted on 10/14/2007 11:21:26 AM PDT by phrogphlyer
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To: goldstategop

..and, of course, to tell other people how to live their lives.


29 posted on 10/14/2007 11:23:25 AM PDT by SAJ
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To: RipSawyer
Well, there's about 50 million Democrats, probably a couple hundred million commies and fellow travelers, a billion or so socialists, the better part of a billion Islamists and their apologists, maybe a couple million pacifists . . . .

So, OK, make it roughly 4.5 billion more deserving.

30 posted on 10/14/2007 11:25:04 AM PDT by Hunton Peck (Hits the Spice Girls should have had, #1: "Black Pepper" (to the tune of "Brown Sugar"))
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To: JimRed
Depends on if you're standing at the head of his coffin, or at the foot.

;^)

31 posted on 10/14/2007 11:27:58 AM PDT by SAJ
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To: shortstop

Who have sacrificially given of themselves - their lives - in the cause of peace - the members of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. There is no no honor great enough that can be given to those brave men and women who lay down their lives for anothers.

Who has steadfastly, in the face of great obstacles, pursued the cause of peace in the world - George W. Bush.


32 posted on 10/14/2007 11:39:01 AM PDT by elpadre
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To: All

In all fairness to the Nobel Committee, you must understand that the decision to award Fat Albert the Trash Bush Nobel Lotto was made about two months before his name was submitted, which was more than a year before those pathetic losers in saffron robes, or those doofazoid conservative baby-hating, tax-cutting, knuckle-dragging, abortion doctor-shooting anti-St. Bob Mugabe insurgents ever came on the scene. So, you see, the Committee’s hands were tied, no matter how much they might have favored those pathetic etc. folks who truly do want peace. Besides, global warming has now been scientifcally proven to threaten gay marriage and be pro-Republican tax cuts and risky tax schemes. The science is settled and he debate over.

See how easy it is when you inject simple fairness into the process?


33 posted on 10/14/2007 12:02:56 PM PDT by DPMD
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To: DPMD
....there were acts of courage and human decency during the Holocaust - stories to bear witness to goodness, love and compassion. This is the story of an incredible woman and her amazing gift to mankind. Irena Sendler. An unfamiliar name to most people, but this remarkable woman defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, she sneaked the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them.

Today Irena Sendler - white-haired, gentle and courageous - is living a modest existence in her Warsaw apartment. An unsung heroine.

Her achievement went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood - have since gained international recognition, along with their teacher, Norman Conard. The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS, has brought Irena Sendlers story to a wider public. The students continue their prize-winning dramatic presentation Life in a Jar.

Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.

But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death. Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children.

To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out. For Irena Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy.

Irena Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department. With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. Irena Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities.

Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. "`Can you guarantee they will live?'" Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. "In my dreams," she said, "I still hear the cries when they left their parents."

Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew I could count on the Sisters." Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: "No one ever refused to take a child from me," she said. The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Irena Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the childrens original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor's back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past.

In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children ...

But the Nazis became aware of Irena's activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, that crippled her for life, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding. Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Gestapo agents to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Nazis.

After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps. The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. "A man, a painter, telephoned me," said Sendler, "`I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!"

Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. "I could have done more," she said. "This regret will follow me to my death." She has been honored by international Jewish organizations - in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Irena Sendler was awarded Poland's highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003, and she was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. Annual Irena Sendler days are celebrated throughout Europe and the United States.

In 2007, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. At a special session in Poland's upper house of Parliament, President Lech Kaczynski announced the unanimous resolution to honor Irena Sendler for rescuing "the most defenseless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children." He referred to her as a "great heroine who can be justly named for the Nobel Peace Prize. She deserves great respect from our whole nation."

During the ceremony Elzbieta Ficowska, who was just six months old when she was saved by Irena Sendler, read out a letter on her behalf: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory,” Irena Sendler said in the letter, “Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget.”

This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants.

The Nobel Prize recipient, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, has dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews. He wrote:

"In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care ..."

- Louis Bülow

34 posted on 10/14/2007 12:45:35 PM PDT by mware (Americans in armchairs....doing the job of the media.)
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To: mware

Thank you for that. What an amazing, inspirational woman. Her humility speaks volumes of her character.

What a sad world we live in when bags of wind get recognition for doing N-O-T-H-I-N-G.


35 posted on 10/14/2007 5:26:35 PM PDT by jnygrl (A big mouth coupled with a small mind is a dangerous combination)
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