How the Nobel Committee Supports Terrorism

When terrorists applaud what you’ve done, you need to reconsider whether you’ve done the right thing.

Robert Sibley | October 15, 2026

When terrorists applaud what you’ve done, you need to reconsider whether you’ve done the right thing.

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........

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