How The Nobel Peace Prize Has Lost Its Way...

Why are we dragging our feet on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan? Maybe the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize wants to put some distance between his prize win and increasing the size of a war.

There are a lot of items circulating on the internet right now about how the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its way, and I would like to share one of them with you now. You can look this up and will find the story to be based on facts, at least, according to the World Wide Web, although a lot of the emails circulating right now are a little dodgy on the true details of the story...

Irena Sendler passed away on May 12, 2008, sadly, not as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Also known as Irena Sendlerowa, she was a Polish social worker who secretly was a member of the Polish Underground, Zegota.

Immediately following the Nazi push into Poland on September 1, 1939, Irena joined with a group of people that created over 3,000 false documents to help smuggle Jews out of Poland.

In 1942, the Zegota appointed Irena as the head of its children's section. As a social worker, Irena had been granted permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto to monitor typhus, charged with ensuring that the disease did not go beyond the ghetto walls.

This afforded Irena the perfect opportunity to head the group's efforts to help Jewish children. Working with as many as 24 other members of Zegota, Irena developed an elaborate scheme by which 2,500 Jewish children were smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto.

Under the guise of ensuring that a typhoid outbreak did not occur, Irena and her fellow conspirators did everything from carrying out children in false bottoms of supply boxes, to hiding them in ambulances and trams, disguised as packages. 

Once freed by the efforts of Irena and the Zegota, these children were placed with Polish families, orphanages and churches with Irena maintaining records of their original identity and their new identity so that once the occupation was over, they could be reunited with surviving relatives.

Irena hid the records in jars that she buried. In 1943, however, the Nazis had caught on to Irena's involvement in Zegota. She was captured, tortured, and sentence to death. Zegota was able to spare her life by bribing Nazi prison guards, and Irena went into hiding for the remainder of the war.

As soon as the occupation ended, Irena returned to Warsaw, dug up her jars, and began working to reunite the children she had saved with surviving family members. Later, Irena would go on to work with the Polish government in exile during the Soviet occupation. Sadly, this landed her in a Soviet prison where she miscarried her second child. Due to her imprisonment, even upon her release, Irena and her children lost many of the rights afforded to the Polish Soviet citizenry, such as the ability to attend state-run universities.

As early as 1965, Irena began receiving awards from the world community, even though she could not venture out of Soviet Poland to accept these awards until 1983 when she was honored by the Isreali Supreme Court.

In 2003, Pope John Paul II recognized Irena's efforts with a personal letter, and Irena was awarded Poland's highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle. 

In 2007, at the age of 97, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but her life-risking efforts to free Jewish children from the Nazis, reunite them with their families after the war, and her fight against the Soviets in Poland, just all paled in comparison to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's efforts to alert the world about Global Warming. Yes, you read that right. If Al Gore is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Irena Sandler, then the prize itself no longer carries the meaning that it once did. Couple that with the award going to President Obama this year, quite literally just for being elected President, and I am done with it all together.

The Methuselah Tree

Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated.

The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders.

Dubbed the “Methuselah Tree” after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four-feet tall.

The species of tree, called the Judean date, is now extinct in Israel, but researchers are hoping that by reviving the plant they may be able to study its medicinal uses.

“The medicinal plants from this region are very important because they are historically mentioned in the Bible and the Koran,” said Sarah Sallon, director of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, which initiated the experiment to grow the tree as part of its Middle East Medicinal Plant Project. “The Judean date was very valuable and very famous, not just as a source of food but as a source of medicine,” Sallon said. “When I heard there were ancient seeds found in the archeological dig, I thought it would be interesting to see if we could try to grow them.”

Carbon dating of the seeds found at Masada revealed that they date from roughly the time of the ancient fortress’ siege, in A.D. 73.

The seeds were found in storage rooms, and appear to have been stockpiled for the Jews hiding out against the invading Romans.

Remember Where It Started...

As reports are being released and the quality of the intelligence that led us to war in Iraq is coming under fire, it is important for us to remember a few important things.

Most notably, President Bush did not undertake the gathering of intelligence himself, nor did he misinterpret the intelligence. Though we may all be in agreement that the intelligence was bad, it was not the President’s fault that he received bad intelligence.

The President was right to rely on the intelligence provided to him from the CIA, intelligence from the world community, and yes, even intelligence from the UN.

Also, it is important to remember that despite what the media is trying to throw at us everyday, many elements of the intelligence were, in fact, quite true. Also, it is important to remember that the US policy prior to President Bush coming into office was one of containment when it came to Saddam Hussein.

The problem with just holding him at bay was that he was in the midst of beefing up his long-range missile development program and developing long-range missiles with chemical and possibly nuclear warheads. The only thing keeping the Iraqi regime from being nuclear capable was purchasing the material at a time when Pakistan was selling nuclear material left and right.

These were missiles that could have hit Turkey, Israel, Greece, Saudi Arabia and other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations. Intelligence on the missile program came from the UN, so this is not a Bush-led conspiracy, folks.

Another key point to remember as people bemoan the quality of intelligence that came from the CIA is that the Clinton administration cut back military and intelligence spending in the years before 9/11.

It was the Clinton administration who continually robbed the CIA of the hands-on intelligence gathering methods of the Cold War that kept us safe. It was the Clinton administration that put us in a position where we were relying on satellite passes instead of boots on the ground.

And lastly, we still cannot ever forget that it was the Clinton administration that sat back in 1993 and in 1997 and in 1998 when U.S. targets at home and abroad were attacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Michael Moore will point out that the Taliban sent an envoy to the U.S. that was welcomed in Texas, even though they were harboring Osama Bin Laden, but he doesn’t mention that the Clinton administration refused time and time again to capture or kill Bin Laden himself when the CIA had him in their sights.