Ursula von der Leyen received the ‘judicial equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize’ from Justin Trudeau in a perfect self-congratulatory orgy
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
rachelmarsden.com
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen receives the World Peace & Liberty Award at UN headquarters in New York, on July 21, 2023 © Yuki IWAMURA / AFP
Get a load of who won – and presented – a new honor that’s modestly being compared to the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you haven’t heard of the World Law Foundation non-profit organization, you could be forgiven. But despite only existing since 2019, it has already created an award described by the Western press as nothing less than the “judicial equivalent” of the world’s top award for promoting peace.
Wonder where they got that idea, if not from the organization itself. Can anyone just create a think tank and put it in charge of an award branded as the latest version of the Nobel Peace Prize? Good luck with that – unless, of course, your board is loaded up with establishment heavyweights – in which case, people just tell themselves that it must be legit since all these VIPs wouldn’t otherwise be involved.
So a few days ago, the humble folks of the World Law Foundation gathered at the United Nations in New York for the World Law Congress. One of the big items on the agenda was to hand out this year’s World Peace and Liberty Award to none other than European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, unelected de facto Queen of Europe, who accepted it on behalf of the commission.
Wow, didn’t see that one coming. Particularly with a former EU commissioner being the vice president of the group’s board, which also includes former Polish and French prime ministers, former Slovenian and Latvian presidents, a former EU vice president, and various Western establishment corporate figures, academics, and jurists.
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You’d think that the same Von der Leyen-led EU Commission would have been a controversial candidate for a peace award given that it’s constantly sided with Washington’s military interventionism or at least have done little to nothing to stop it, and even led the way in the case of Libyan regime change. Most recently, the EU had a chance to stop the conflict in Ukraine before it even started by demanding Kiev’s adherence to the Minsk agreements and rejecting the West’s arming and training of anti-Russian fighters on the border with Russia.
“For the first time ever, the European Union will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack,” von der Leyen said last year, calling it “a watershed moment.” Know what else is a watershed moment? Giving a peace award to someone whose knee-jerk reaction to armed conflict was to flood the zone with even more weapons. Then again, maybe the Nobel Peace Prize is indeed the right comparison, given that it was prematurely awarded to former US President Barack Obama even before he could order more bombing in Africa and the Middle East.
Von der Leyen also embodies the epitome of freedom, apparently. Or at least the best that this group could find. Who was she even up against? Did Genghis Khan’s estate turn down the award or something?
“We’ll present this month a legislative proposal for a Digital Green Pass,” she tweeted in March 2021. “The Digital Green Pass should facilitate Europeans’ lives. The aim is to gradually enable them to move safely in the European Union or abroad – for work or tourism.” She conveniently left out the part about Europeans being denied the basic right to access everyday venues, travel, work, and assemble – all because you chose not to take a jab that prevented neither transmission nor acquisition of an overwhelmingly survivable virus. We’re talking about the same Big Pharma jab about which von der Leyen has yet to hand over, even to an investigative committee of the EU itself, personal communications with the CEO of Pfizer around the time the EU was making a deal with the company.
Von der Leyen has been about as open and free with that matter as she and the EU Commission have been with media platforms and narratives that risk challenging the establishment dogma, issuing top-down bans and legislation that override any due process at the nation-state level.
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So after asking themselves who’d be a worthy recipient of this global freedom and peace prize, and coming up with an unelected EU bureaucrat who’s dragging Europe and the world deeper into armed conflict and Europeans into poverty with inflation and intellectual darkness with censorship, they turned to the question of the presenter. These World Peace and Liberty folks were apparently like, “Who could we get to present this that embodies freedom and peace? Hey, how about that dude in Canada who did the Freedom Convoy crackdown and whose country helped train the Azov neo-Nazis to wage war against Russia then tried to hide it from the press to avoid embarrassment?”
Enter Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Nothing says freedom like invoking a martial law-style crackdown over a bunch of honking truckers protesting against the two-tier society fostered by Trudeau’s authoritarian Covid mandates – and then blocking their bank accounts as a dissuasion technique.
“Brexit left many wondering if the union would continue to hold strong. Euroskepticism was on the rise. And protectionism and authoritarianism were becoming more prevalent,” Trudeau said, presumably as a newly-minted authority on authoritarianism, having just recently dabbled in it himself.
“As choruses like ‘America First’ got louder, both Canada and Europe held fast to our belief that growth doesn’t come from putting up walls and turning inwards,” the Canadian prime minister added. Actually, no one has been singing backup to the America First chorus louder than Canada and Europe, blindly following along with the agenda set in Washington on everything from Ukraine to climate, even if it’s to the detriment of their own citizens’ interests.
If both – or either – of these Western entities had unambiguously stood up to Washington on recent key issues of global importance, then the world would be in a much better place, their own citizens first and foremost. And they wouldn’t need to go around blowing their own horn and making a big deal of a fawning establishment entity also offering them a blow on the world stage.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
