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As The Telegraph reports:
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was implicated in the October 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.UNRWA was shortlisted for the prestigious award in February despite Israeli claims that dozens of its workers took part in the attacks by distributing ammunition, abducting hostages, and co-ordinating transportation.
What really happened was two non-stories that were slapped together by a hungry media.
The first non-story was that UNRWA was indeed nominated for the prize. The reason that story is meaningless is because literally anyone (who is alive) can be nominated.
I know this from experience, because in 2018, when I read an equally stupid story about how the BDS movement was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, I looked into how the nomination process works and discovered that tens of thousands of people are eligible to nominate anyone. Valid nominators include any country's members of national assemblies and governments as well as any university professors of history, philosophy, religion, theology, social sciences or law.
Previous nominees include Adolf Hitler (as a joke) and Josef Stalin (seriously, in both 1945 and 1948.)
So I got myself officially nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2069, you can go to the future Nobel holographic website and see my name there (and who my nominator was.)
In other words, being nominated is pretty meaningless, and news stories about nominations are fluff.
In this case, though, the media made it sound like UNRWA was "shortlisted" and one of the top condensers for the prize. The reason for this is because they were listed, along with four other potential winners, by the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), as the most likely winners .
But PRIO has nothing to do with the Nobel Committee. They issue their own list every year for self-promotion; their track record of predicting the actual winner is pretty bad. PRIO gets publicity with their annual list and that is the only time the institute makes world headlines, so this is their moment.
This caused pro-Israel groups to write letters to the Nobel Committee asking them to rescind the nomination. But the Nobel Committee has no mechanism to do that - if you are nominated, you cannot be un-nominated.
As usual, PRIO's list had no bearing on the actual winner, which was just announced to be the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo where survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki campaign against nuclear weapons.
Just because something is in the news does not mean it is newsworthy.
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