MJ Akbar
Acampaign is wandering around select parts of the world that President Donald Trump should get the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2025. Since Barack Obama got the prize in 2009 for doing nothing, the argument is not wholly invalid.
The Nobel citation claimed that Obama won for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” when he had not even settled down in the White House. There is no reason why the Nobel Peace Prize committee should not revert to Peaceful Genuflection. But this may miss the point. Trump should get the Nobel Prize for Service to Columnists. He is a gift which keeps on giving, and I say this with the utmost respect and gratitude, just in case the now truncated CIA misunderstands. The White House has produced a headline a day to keep editors at bay. Some are effective, and some touched with the bizarre, but all have impact. Some of the socalled outlandish demands touch the right nerve, particularly those which put brakes on a free ride.
Ukraine’s rare earths
No one ever asked Ukraine for quid pro quo. Its President Zelensky, whose Government seesaws between defiance and corruption, knew instantly that the game had changed when Trump demanded Ukraine’s rare earths in return for $200 billion in gratis grants. Zelensky, who had claimed that this $200 billion was fiction, quickly bent as backward as a yoga guru in his prime. He invited American companies to dig for rare earths, agreed to meet Vladimir Putin and waited for the next diktat. It works.
Except when it doesn’t. Trump’s desire to turn the bloodstained Gaza Strip into a playing beach for the rich, teeming perhaps with Trump Towers and Trump casinos, is as tragic as impossible. Surely, Trump does not believe in it; he is too intelligent. No Arab state, and no Palestinian, will accept the exodus of Palestinians from Gaza. The idea is a verbal carrot for Benjamin Netanyahu, a prelude to some unclear and unexamined prospective deal. The danger is that the bizarre might defeat the good.
‘Jinnah’ in Dhaka
The 21st century calls out for a Nobel Prize in Irony. The self-appointed Czar of Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus, eager to stain the narrative of his country’s independence struggle in which millions were massacred by the Pakistan Army in 1971, has permitted direct flights between Karachi and Dhaka on an airline called Fly Jinnah.
In 1948, within a year of the creation of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah told a stunned Dhaka audience that Urdu would replace Bengali in official use as the national language. Bengali would not get even parallel status. Jinnah slipped from hero to villain. In the first election in East Pakistan, his Muslim League was wiped out. Language was the inspiration for the emergence of Bangladesh. Has Yunus’ brain got so thoroughly washed that he cannot recognise the dangerous echoes of history?
With Jinnah landing in Dhaka, the resistance could acquire a different momentum. The reminder is provocative. Perhaps the Pakistani owner of the airline has a long memory, and is enjoying schadenfreude. Fly Jinnah is a low-cost airline which could extract a high price from Dhaka.
