MOSCOW, August 30 (RIA Novosti) – US President Barack Obama should be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize if the United States carries out a military strike on Syria, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament’s International Affairs Committee, said Friday.
“If the United States attacks Syria without UN approval, the global community should demand that the Nobel Committee strip Obama of his peace prize,” the senior lawmaker wrote on his Twitter page.
He added that the United States did not have the right to speak on behalf of NATO or the global community.
“The United Kingdom’s refusal to support aggression against Syria is a serious blow to the arguments of [armed intervention] supporters in both NATO and the US,” Pushkov wrote.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron suffered a historic defeat in a vote on Syrian intervention on Thursday, when the UK parliament voted down a motion calling for a “strong humanitarian response” to the two-year civil war.
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” according to a statement on the prize’s website.
Activist site RootsAction.org has gathered nearly 24,000 signatures on a petition to revoke Obama’s peace prize because “his increasing intervention in Syria promises the loss of even more than the nearly 100,000 lives already needlessly sacrificed.”
