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While the World’s Eyes are on the Genocide in Palestine, the Nobel Committee Awards the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado

By 9 Mins Read

How could this be in the spirit of the Will of Alfred Nobel?

2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado once asked Netanyahu to militarily intervene and help overthrow President Maduro, even pledging to move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem. Now she’s rewarded for inviting a foreign apartheid state to attack her own country so Washington can seize Venezuela’s oil.

Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, nominated Machado for the Peace Prize together with a group of U.S. members of Congress in August 2024, when he was still a senator. Not only did she invite the Trump Admin’s drug war on her country, she also has not condemned the extrajudicial assassinations by US forces. Further, Machado participated together with the Likud Party of the apartheid state of Israel in the Patriots summit on February 8, 2025, in Madrid. The Patriots for Europe is a coalition of European extreme right, the third largest coalition in the European Parliament: https://patriots.eu/.

Trump has advocated going to war against Venezuela and seizing the country’s oil resources. There is no reason to defend the lack of democracy in Venezuela or the authoritarian rule, but Trump’s warmongering solves nothing. I don’t think the award is in line with Alfred Nobel’s will. – Bjørnar Moxnes, Rødt

Morgenbladet: The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Machado plays directly into this major political drama, which in the worst case could lead to an open military conflict between the United States and Venezuela.

This year’s Nobel Prize award bears a certain imprint of Asle Toje, the deputy chair of the Nobel Committee, who the Progress Party nominated as a member of the prestigious committee. He has traveled in Venezuela and probably knows Machado well. She is a deeply conservative politician who is ideologically close to the Trump administration. In a video published last month, she supported Trump’s increasing military pressure against Maduro.

In recent weeks, US military forces have carried out several missile attacks on boats from Venezuela that are allegedly smuggling drugs to the United States. No evidence of this smuggling has been presented, but 21 people have been killed in the attacks. The US has sent military vessels to the waters off Venezuela, and this week asked Grenada for permission to deploy military equipment on the island state’s territory. The aim is to increase the military pressure against Maduro even further.

Venezuela requested an URGENT United Nations Security Council Meeting

What are the criteria to win a Nobel Peace Prize?

On its website, the committee says that, since World War II, the prize has been awarded in recognition of efforts in four key areas:

  • Arms control and disarmament.
  • Peace negotiation.
  • Democracy and human rights.
  • Work aimed at creating a better-organized and more peaceful world.

Huge bets hours before the award: –⁠ Means there has been a leak

Gamblers bet massive amounts of money on María Corina Machado hours before the Peace Prize was announced. The Nobel Institute is launching an investigation into the matter, according to VG.

At 00:40, the probability of Machado being awarded was 3.75 percent
At 00:45, it had risen to 7.6 percent
At 01:00, the probability had risen to 39 percent
At 02:00, the probability had risen to a whopping 72.8 percent

We strongly condemn the @NobelPrize committee’s unconscionable decision to award this year’s peace prize to @MariaCorinaYA. Ms. Machado is a vocal supporter of Israel’s racist Likud Party, and earlier this year, she delivered remarks at a conference of European fascists, including Geert Wilders and Marie Le Pen, which openly called for a new Reconquista, referencing the ethnic cleansing of Spanish Muslims and Jews in the 1500s.

The Nobel Peace Prize should go to individuals who have shown moral consistency by bravely advocating justice for all people, not to politicians who demand democracy in their own nation while supporting racism, bigotry, and fascism abroad.

We call on Ms. Machado to renounce her support for the Likud Party and anti-Muslim fascism in Europe. If she refuses to do so, the Nobel Prize committee should reconsider its decision, which has undermined its own reputation.

An anti-Muslim bigot and supporter of European fascism would have no place being mentioned alongside the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other worthy winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize committee should instead recognize an honoree who has shown moral consistency by bravely pursuing justice for all people, such as one of the students, journalists, activists, or medical professionals who have risked their careers and even their lives to oppose the crime of our time: the genocide in Gaza. #NobelPeacePrize
– CAIR National America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization

Spanish far-right party VOX hosted the summit in Madrid with prominent European far-right leaders, including Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders. The event highlights their shared political agenda ahead of the upcoming elections. #VOX #Madrid #FarRight #EuropeanPolitics #LePen #Orban

Venezuelan Voices:

Convening under the banner of “Patriots for Europe”, on February 8, 2025, the European extreme right met in Madrid, bringing political leaders of the Trumpist current together like some budget, fascist Avengers. Marching under the flags of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and neo-fascism, representatives from France, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Poland were hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox.

And while it’s easy to see why the slogan is used by a European ultra-right obsessed with reclaiming its colonialist past and expelling the ‘infidels’ from Europe, the presence of right-wingers from Venezuela and Israel seems less natural. But Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and the Israeli Likud party took part in it and presented themselves as frontline fighters of the same Western civilizational battle.

The Venezuelans Cheering Trump’s Drug War

by Gisela Salim-Peyer in The Atlantic:
Machado told me that she wished the Trump administration would carry out a “big antinarcotics operation in the Caribbean,” given that, she said, Venezuela was the country through which most Colombian drugs make their way to the United States. After all, Machado added, Maduro is the leader of Tren de Aragua, a gang Trump often decries.
Six months after we spoke, the United States started sending warships to the Caribbean for what the White House has framed as an operation against a “narco-terror cartel”: Maduro’s regime. The Pentagon deployed a flotilla of eight vessels, along with surveillance planes and an attack submarine. On September 2, the U.S. military launched its first strike, taking down a speedboat that Trump said was carrying drugs to the United States and killing its 11 crew members, whom Trump identified as Tren de Aragua members and terrorists.

The Biden administration had a different view on Venezuela’s drug traffic:

Venezuela’s production of cocaine is modest; of fentanyl, virtually nonexistent. President Joe Biden’s State Department estimated the share of the world’s cocaine traffic that passes through Venezuela at 13 percent at most. That percentage is higher for some other Latin American countries, such as Guatemala.

Netanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

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