Jimmy Carter Still Has Hope

One day before this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner is to be announced, President and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter said he still hopes President Obama will make good on the promises he made that ultimately won him the prize two years ago.

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 even though, by then, he had been in office for less than a year and his contributions toward peace hadn’t yet gone beyond promises to measurable action.

“It was given [to Obama] primarily because of some of the commitments he had made verbally, his speeches and so forth about taking the leadership role and dealing with global warming and dealing with the immigration problem, enhancing human rights, promoting peace in the Middle East,” Carter, who won the prize in 2002, told Reuters.

But to date, Obama still has a lot of ground to cover if he intends to make good on those prize-winning promises. –BF

Reuters:

Carter, 86, who has worked to resolve conflicts and promote democracy since losing office 30 years ago, has been critical of U.S. — and Israeli — positions on Middle East peace and called Obama’s likely veto of giving U.N. membership to a Palestinian state a “mistake” at a time when, he believed, the Arab Spring had opened new possibilities for settling the region’s disputes.

Obama, who acknowledged that his award was controversial in 2009 when “at the beginning and not at the end” of his presidency, has been accused of failing to deliver on promises made in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo that year.

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