@Ionus,
Terrorists? Why Nelson Mandela was not a terrorist. Ask President Obama. I think the President, or one of his cronies, is planning to elevate Mandela to sainthood. I, on the other hand, had hopes that he would have been dispatched with a shiv while in Prison.
I am waiting for the conflation of several of the Peace Prize winners in one picture:
What a great photo it would be:
On the left, Nelson Mandela, next, Barack Obama, next Yasser Arafat, then, Jimmy Carter and, a surprise-Rigoberta Menchu.
And, who is Rigoberta? A prime example of the idiocy and lack of vetting done by the Peace Committee.
Note:
In the book, Menchú maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had founded the peasant movement known as the Committee for Campesino Unity. Instead, Stoll and New York Times journalist Larry Rohter found that Vicente Menchú, while poor, was relatively prosperous by local Mayan standards. As leader of his community, he won a 27.53 km² land grant from the Guatemalan government. Unfortunately, his success led to a long-running dispute with his wife's relatives, in the Tum family, who claimed some of the same land. During the late 1970s, when Vicente Menchú's daughter claimed that he was an underground radical political organizer, he was at home in his village of Chimel working with U.S. Peace Corps volunteers.
In her 1982 life story, Menchú claimed that she and her family had been forced to work as peons on a distant coastal plantation for eight months of the year, as millions of other impoverished Mayan farmworkers continue to do every year. According to neighbors, however, the family was sufficiently well-off to avoid this fate. Menchú also claimed that her father refused to allow her to attend school, on the grounds that it would turn her into a non-indigenous "ladino" who would forget her Mayan roots, but in reality, Catholic nuns supported her in a succession of private boarding schools until she reached the 8th grade.
Stoll claims that Menchú's account of watching her younger brother Nicolas die of malnutrition was false, as Stoll located a living brother of hers named Nicolas. Menchú has responded that she was referring to another brother also named Nicolas (giving several children the same name is a common practice among rural Mayans in Guatemala). When interviewed by Rohter, the surviving Nicolas affirmed that two brothers had died of malnutrition but remembered the name of only one of them, Felipe.[7]
In one episode in her 1982 story, Menchú claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio had been burned alive by Guatemala's military while she and her family were forced to watch in a town plaza. After interviewing local townspeople and reviewing contemporary human rights reports, Stoll concluded that Petrocinio was shot and killed by Army-supported paramilitary groups, rather than burned to death, and his body dumped in a mass grave, and that Menchú and her family had not witnessed his death. In follow-up interviews with the New York Times, Menchú conceded that she had not personally witnessed the murder of her brother as it was related to her by her mother.
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No one should take the phony Peace Prize seriously--
Mendela, Arafat, Obama, Carter, Menchu--what a motley crew!!!
