OPINION - Why the Nobel Committee must reconsider its award to Maria Corina Machado
The decision to award Maria Corina Machado a Nobel not only diminishes the credibility of the prize but risks turning it into a symbol of Western hypocrisy rather than global justice
Edward Ahmed Mitchell | 17.10.2025 TRT/AA
- The author is the deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
ISTANBUL
Of all the awards that the Nobel Committee hands out every year, the Nobel Peace Prize has long been the most prominent. From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to South African President Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize has often highlighted monumental figures of history who peacefully advanced causes of justice while overcoming remarkable challenges.
Yet this year, the Nobel Committee's decision to honor Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado has betrayed the values that once defined the award. Far from embodying the legacy of Dr. King or Mandela, Ms. Machado has consistently aligned herself with movements and leaders that promote war, xenophobia, and bigotry.
Earlier this year, she addressed the Patriots of Europe, a far-right gathering of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant fascists. Speakers included Dutch politician Geert Wilders and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. As Reuters reported, "All the speakers railed against immigration and most called for a new ‘Reconquista,’ a reference to the medieval re-conquest of Muslim-controlled parts of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian kingdoms." The rally, Reuters added, was opened by a video message from none other than Machado.
Ally of Israel’s ruling Likud Party
Her address to the Patriots of Europe was not a one-time dalliance with racists and fascists. Her party, Vente Venezuela, entered into a formal alliance in 2020 with Israel's ruling Likud Party, a partnership she personally signed and that remains in effect today. Likud is a far-right, openly racist, and genocidal political party that has spent decades leading the fight to perpetuate occupation, apartheid, and mass violence against Palestinians – policies now under investigation by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.
Machado has praised Israel’s government, declared that "the struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel," and pledged to move Venezuela's Embassy to Jerusalem despite Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of the entire city.
Although the Nobel Committee claims that Ms. Machado peacefully supports democracy in Venezuela, she has called for foreign military intervention to topple the Maduro government and even expressed support for bombing unidentified individuals in boats off the country's coast.
By choosing Machado, the Nobel Committee has sent a dangerous message – that moral inconsistency, extremism, and alignment with fascist movements can be overlooked whenever a politician opposes a Western adversary. The decision not only diminishes the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize but risks turning it into a symbol of Western hypocrisy rather than global justice.
What the Peace Prize should reward
The Nobel Peace Prize should go to a person who has shown moral consistency by peacefully pursuing justice for all people, not to a politician who claims to support democracy in her own nation while supporting war, fascism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry abroad.
If Machado wishes to prove she is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, she should immediately renounce her alliance with the Likud Party, apologize for addressing the Patriots of Europe conference and renounce anti-Muslim fascism, and retract her support for violence as a means of securing political change. If she refuses to take these steps, the Nobel Committee should do the honorable thing: rescind the award and select a laureate whose life’s work truly reflects peace and justice – one of the countless activists, journalists, healthcare workers, or human rights defenders who have peacefully pursued justice for all.
The Nobel Peace Prize made a mistake this year. There is still time to correct it.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.
The CIA Wins Another Nobel Peace Prize
While millions waited in hopes that the Global Sumud Flotilla would win this year’s Nobel peace prize for its epic solidarity with Palestine, the Norwegian committee charged with granting the award gave it to Maria Corina Machado instead, veteran CIA coup plotter in Venezuela. As the late Gore Vidal aptly advised, “Never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor.”
A day later in Gaza, the Israeli army destroyed the children’s hospital Al Rantisi with dynamite charges exponentially more powerful than those conceived by their inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), creator of the prize that carries his name. With the victims’ bodies barely cold in the rubble where the hospital previously stood, Machado praised the Holy State as a “genuine ally of liberty” while sending compliments to the “long-suffering Venezuelan people” as well as President Trump: “I accept this award in your honor, because you really deserve it.”
Congratulations poured in, among them, from Barack Obama, who won the peace prize in 2009 on his way to authorizing seven wars in Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria). Also from Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo, who called Machado a “world class Venezuelan,” an appraisal that would have shamed his father (Juan Jose Arevalo), the first democratically elected president of the Central American republic and author of The Shark and the Sardines, a strong anti-imperialist essay whose title alone captures the historic power dynamic between Washington and Latin America.
Machado, a pseudo-Venezuelan “sardine” eager to sell-out her country to the “shark” in Washington, was received in the White House in 2005 by George W. Bush in recognition of the quality of her aspirations, and twenty years later she is still at it, imploring Trump to invade Venezuela in the name of liberty, democracy, and the struggle against narco-terrorism. Of course this has nothing to do with Venezuelan’s proven oil reserves of 303.8 billion barrels, the most of any country in the world. Perish the thought.
Dr. Nobel, an arms manufacturer who got the idea for awarding a peace prize from his secretary Bertha Felicie Sophie, who was a pacifist and feminist, as well as the author of Lay Down Your Arms (1889). In his will, Nobel stated that the profits from his considerable fortune were to reward “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Since its creation (1901) the prize has been accompanied by pious Eurocentrism and conditioned by Great Power geopolitics that have more to do with tweaking the conditions of permanent war than they do with establishing peace. This was never more evident than in the case of Woodrow Wilson, who won the prize in 1919.
Elected on a peace platform, Wilson immediately plunged the U.S. into the bloodiest war in world history (at the time) — World War I — transforming an expensive battlefield stalemate into a lopsided victory for the Allies, who promptly imposed a bitter and humiliating “peace” on starving Germany, which began to take growing note of the German-supremacist denunciations of an obscure Austrian corporal. Forgotten was Wilson’s Fourteen Points declaration he had boomed across the Atlantic on the pretext it contained the secret to human happiness and permanent world peace. Once his complete lack of strategic sense was revealed at Versailles, Europe’s veteran imperialists ignored his pious nostrum about establishing a “machinery of friendship” in favor of perpetuating European colonialism, leaving Wilson unable to convince even his own country to join his crowning glory — the League of Nations.
Other “great” Americans who won a Nobel peace prize include Nordic-supremacist Teddy Roosevelt, for whom war was a greater thrill than life itself, and whose popular book series, The Winning of the West, was worthy of Himmler. He estimated that “nine out of every ten” Indians were better dead than alive, deemed “coloreds” degenerate by nature, and looked on Latin peoples (“damned dagoes”) as little more than children. He applauded U.S. civilian massacres in the Philippines, which killed hundreds of thousands.
However, the most genocidal U.S. winner of the peace prize would have to be the late Henry Kissinger, who befriended apartheid South Africa, ushered General Pinochet into power in Chile, gave the green light to Indonesia’s mass extermination of East Timor’s mountain people, and killed millions of Indochinese with saturation bombings. His comment about the Cambodian phase of the latter attacks, which paved the way for Pol Pot’s rise to power, make an ideal epitaph for the career of the clueless foreign policy expert: “I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see a moral issue involved.”
With the Scandinavian sense of humor continuing to enrich our political folklore, there’s no reason for Donald Trump to lose hope.
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