{"id":1122,"date":"2009-10-12T11:26:56","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T15:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.urbin.net\/blog\/?p=1122"},"modified":"2009-10-12T11:26:56","modified_gmt":"2009-10-12T15:26:56","slug":"the-other-nominees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/politics\/the-other-nominees\/","title":{"rendered":"The other nominees…"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a lot of chatter about our Dear Leader<\/em> winning the Nobel Peace Prize for\u00a0completing\u00a0Jack and Squat, including some flat out laughter from George Stephanopoulos<\/a>, so I’m not going to focus on that.<\/p>\n

Instead I want to look at the other people who were in the running for the prize.<\/p>\n

Ingrid Betancourt<\/strong>. She was kidnapped by the\u00a0Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia<\/a> (FARC) on 23 February 2002 and was rescued by Colombian security forces six and a half years later on 2 July 2008. The rescue operation, dubbed\u00a0Operation Jaque, rescued Betancourt along with 14 other hostages (three\u00a0Americans and 11 Colombian policemen and soldiers).\u00a0In all, she was held captive for 2,321 days after being taken while campaigning for the\u00a0Colombian presidency as a\u00a0Green. She had decided to campaign in rebel controlled areas despite warnings from the government, police and military not to do so. Her kidnapping received worldwide coverage, particularly in France, because of her dual French citizenship.<\/p>\n

Dr. Sima Sama<\/strong>r<\/strong>,\u00a0\u00a0she practiced medicine at a government hospital in\u00a0Kabul<\/a>, but after a few months was forced to flee for her safety to her native\u00a0Jaghoori, where she provided medical treatment to patients throughout the remote areas of central Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

In 1984, the\u00a0communist regime arrested her husband, and Samar and her young son fled to the safety of nearby\u00a0Pakistan. She then worked as a doctor at the refugee branch of the Mission Hospital. Distressed by the total lack of health care facilities for\u00a0Afghan refugee women, she established in 1989 the\u00a0Shuhada\u00a0Organization and Shuhada Clinic in\u00a0Quetta,\u00a0Pakistan.<\/p>\n

After living in refuge for over a decade, Samar returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to assume a cabinet post in the\u00a0Afghan Transitional Administration. In the interim government, she served as\u00a0Deputy President and then as Minister for Women\u2019s Affairs. She was forced into resignation from her post after she was threatened with death and harassed for questioning conservative\u00a0Islamic laws, especially\u00a0sharia law, during an interview in\u00a0Canada with a\u00a0Persian-language newspaper. During the\u00a02003 Loya Jirga, several religious conservatives took out an ad in a local newspaper calling Samar the\u00a0Salman Rushdie\u00a0of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Dr. Samar publicly refuses to accept that women must be kept in\u00a0purdah<\/a>(secluded from the public) and speaks out against the wearing of the\u00a0burqa(head-to-foot wrap), which was enforced first by the fundamentalist\u00a0mujahideen and then by the\u00a0Taliban. She also has drawn attention to the fact that many women in Afghanistan suffer from\u00a0osteomalacia, a softening of the bones, due to an inadequate diet. Wearing the burqa reduces exposure to sunlight and aggravates the situation for women suffering from osteomalacia.<\/p>\n

Hu Jia<\/strong> is an activist and dissident in the People\u2019s Republic of China. His work has focused on the\u00a0Chinese democracy movement, Chinese\u00a0environmentalist movement, and\u00a0HIV\/AIDS in the People\u2019s Republic of China. Hu is the director of\u00a0June Fourth Heritage & Culture Association, and he has been involved with AIDS advocacy as the executive director of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education.<\/p>\n

Thich Quang Do<\/strong>: He has spent his entire life fighting for freedom of religion in Vietnam. \u00a0He has spent the past thirty years being exiled, imprisoned, and persecuted.<\/p>\n

HT to The Daily Fiona for the list<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a lot of chatter about our Dear Leader winning the Nobel Peace Prize for\u00a0completing\u00a0Jack and Squat, including some flat out laughter from George Stephanopoulos, so I’m not going to focus on that. Instead I want to look at the other people who were in the running for the prize. Ingrid Betancourt. She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,19],"tags":[140,262,406,414,567,621],"class_list":["post-1122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bho-politics","category-politics","tag-barack-obama","tag-democrat","tag-human-rights","tag-incompetent","tag-novel-peace-prize","tag-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pab4zg-i6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbin.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}