There are bad decisions and disgraceful ones. And then there’s the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay.
The choice is hardly out of character for an award whose history has repeatedly shown that its name guarantees nothing about its recipients’ merit. Indeed, this isn’t an aberration for the Norwegian committee. But it’s an especially egregious example of a familiar pattern: an international establishment congratulating itself for advancing peace while rewarding people whose records make a mockery of the concept.
Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has become a symbol of the double standards permeating the global system. The woman now being feted in the name of peace presided over a more aptly dubbed “inquisition” whose whole purpose was to brand the Jewish state with a bloody—blood libelous—stain. Like an irremovable tattoo.
The term “genocide” has a specific legal definition, including the requirement to establish intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It’s laughable to suggest that Israel’s behavior even remotely fits that description, as it took great pains to avoid civilian casualties and flooded Gaza with humanitarian aid.
That Hamas kept stealing the food and medicine, and prevented anyone other than its goons from entering the hundreds of miles of tunnels, was never of interest to Pillay and her ilk. Nor did they ever note that the population in Gaza has grown in the past three years. Some genocide.
Though her commission’s report wasn’t a judicial verdict, the force of its accusation was unmistakable, and Pillay was gleefully instrumental in promoting the lie for pernicious purposes. Which we now see has paid off, big-time.
This was hardly the first time her commission helped fuel the campaign to portray Israel as uniquely depraved. Pillay, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014), was appointed to her latest post in 2021. That was when the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council to concoct a report to vilify Israel.
And, boy, did she ever come through for her anti-Israel colleagues, producing a mendacious paper on Israeli “crimes” in Gaza. Its allegations reinforced a false narrative depicting Israel not as a country at war with sadistic barbarians—thousands of whom breached the border on Oct. 7, 2023 to rape, maim and slaughter 1,200 innocent Israelis, and abduct 251 others—but as a sexually abusive state.
Nothing new about the turpitude of the U.N.’s endless attempts to demonize Israel. So, Pillay’s having been selected to head the commission wasn’t surprising.
Ditto for her winning an award transformed long ago into a vehicle for leftist virtue-signaling. In his 1895 will, Swedish scientist/businessman Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, bequeathed most of his immense fortune to establishing prizes in science, literature and peace.
The latter was intended to recognize efforts toward fraternity among nations. Its subsequent history, however, has repeatedly exposed the gulf between those ideals and the eponymous committee’s selections. Rather than consistently rewarding meaningful contributions to peace, the prize has served as a platform for globalist ideology involving the inversion of right and wrong.
Pillay epitomizes this moral rot. Her new laureate status is less an honor than a mark of Cain.
To add to this blot, her prize was announced on Oct. 9, two days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust. The timing highlights the perversity of the prize and its recipient.
