When terrorists applaud what you’ve done, you need to reconsider whether you’ve done the right thing.
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Take the case of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision last week to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African jurist with avowedly anti-Semitic views. Hamas has applauded the decision.
Pillay, a former United Nations human rights official, is known for her role in helping end apartheid in South Africa and her work on the International Criminal Tribunal on the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. More recently, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” Pillay declared when the commission report was released in September 2025. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
The Nobel Committee said Pillay’s decades-long “efforts to promote peace and international law” warranted the award, but committee chairman, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, acknowledged that her leadership of the UN commission “was an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”
Hamas leaders this week expressed their appreciation of the Norwegian’s reasoning, hailing Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize for bringing “serious international recognition” to what they regard as Israel’s crimes.
It is a scurrilous claim, if only because the UN report largely ignores the horrors of the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The 72-page report, The Question of Palestine, offers abstracted references to “brutal war crimes” committed in the attacks on southern Israel, but effectively dismisses their relevance because the attacks “did not pose an existential threat to the State of Israel.” The commission offers numerous examples of alleged Israeli atrocities, fails to provide similarly detailed accounts of the 4,000 terrorists — mostly young men — who murdered, raped, and mutilated 1,200 Israeli children, women, and men, most of whom were unarmed. There’s no mention of the parents who were butchered with their children forced to watch. To add to the horror, Hamas seized 251 people — women and children included — as hostages.
We know about this brutality in part because the terrorists recorded their savagery on cell phones. Did Pillay and her colleagues look at any of this evidence? Did they read media accounts? The New York Times in December, 2023 published a detailed exposé of Hamas’s sexual violence entitled “Screams Without Words.” Even the BBC and the Guardian, neither of which is friendly toward Israel, reported on Hamas’s systematic use of rape and sexual violence. Somehow, the UN commission missed — or, more likely, dismissed — this evidence even though it was charged with investigating all evidence of human rights abuses. Considering how readily Pillay accused Israel of genocide, such obfuscation on the sexual violence of Hamas can only be regarded as deliberate. No doubt Hamas was grateful and only too happy to show it.
In all good conscience, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has to consider the implications of a murderous terrorist organization endorsing their honoree. Surely, they were aware of the evidence from the invasion. Were they troubled that Pillay’s commission made such a one-sided judgment about the conflict in Gaza? Not only is the moral integrity and credibility of the committee at stake, but so, too, is the legacy of previous Peace Prize recipients.
To be sure, Pillay’s prize announcement has been greeted far and wide — from Amnesty International to the Dalai Lama — with high-fives. The reaction of Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for UN human rights chief Volker Turk, is typical of the majority view: “Navi Pillay remains an inspiration to millions globally, including her colleagues at the U.N. human rights office.”
There is a minority, however, who say only jihadist terrorists and their leftist acolytes will be inspired by Pillay’s award. “We are shocked that the Nobel Committee honored Navi Pillay,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch. “Her troubling record on antisemitism and gross breach of ethics in presiding over a notorious UN commission utterly disqualifies her from such an award.”
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No surprise, Israel’s Foreign Ministry expressed similar views. “When a jihadist terrorist organization like Hamas applauds a Nobel Peace Prize, the moral judgment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is rightly called into question,” the ministry said.
Perhaps the strongest indictment of the Nobel Committee’s moral obtuseness came from Elisha Wiesel, the son of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his efforts to ensure the world could never deny the reality of the Nazi genocide.
“My father was honored because he had turned the memory of genocide into a moral duty to the living,” said Elisha Wiesel. “The UN Commission of Inquiry… betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel,” he said. “By honoring Navi Pillay, who accused Israel of genocide, the committee has betrayed his legacy.”
Indeed, Pillay and, by extension, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, are holding Israel to a standard of moral conduct that no other nation would be expected to adhere to in a time of war. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy describes the Hamas attack as “the first time when citizens have been murdered, tortured, violated with such sadism and on such a large scale.” Israel’s response to the Hamas invasion was no different from what the United States did in Afghanistan after 9/11, or what France did in Mosul after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
Yet, three years after 10/7, many Western leaders, including Canada’s, shamefully reward terrorism by isolating Israel internationally and treating it as the aggressor and the Gaza invaders as victims. Like Pillay’s commission of inquiry, they fault Israel for targeting civilians, while at the same time ignoring Hamas’s placement of rocket launchers and weaponry in hospitals, schools, and residential areas. They conveniently ignore how the Israel Defense Force, unlike other militaries, drops leaflets and uses mass phoning to warn Gazans of impending attacks. They don’t even credit Israel with providing Gazans with polio vaccines. What country bent on genocide vaccinates its enemies?
Israel’s wartime conduct comes nowhere near meeting the definition of genocide: “the systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.” Of course, there’s been hunger and deprivation in Gaza, but that’s largely because Hamas steals thousands of tons of food Israel allows to be shipped across its border. What country bent on genocide feeds its enemies?
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, no doubt reflecting the anti-Israeli foreign policies of the Norwegian government, needs to rethink the 2026 Peace Prize. I’m not aware of any precedent for such an action, but the committee will betray the Nobel legacy and the principles of international law it claims to promote if it does not act. Anything less makes the Nobel Committee complicit in terrorism.
Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia in Canada, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.
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Image: Wayamo Foundation