Intent on stroking one another’s outsize egos, two thugs in the White House smirk at the latest ingratiation-beyond-belief feature of their alliance.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu assures President Donald Trump that he is an inimitable peacemaker and therefore would be a worthy winner of a Nobel Peace Prize.

We know of this Orwellian tragedy because the world’s media treated as headline news the Netanyahu announcement that he was proposing Trump’s name to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Some media commentary appeared to report Trump as worthy because, in retrospect, previous recipients Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama should have been judged unworthy.

Leave aside the Netanyahu obscenity for a minute, instead ponder evidence for the Trump candidacy. Cheerleaders for Trump, presumably self-appointed MAGA supporters even if they live in Australia, said, “He brought peace to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Obama did not do that.”

Claims about a Rwanda/Congo settlement ignore the distinction between peace — an end to fighting — and peace with justice – as in sustained efforts to ensure a human rights-based quality of life for all affected citizens long after overt conflict has ended. What evidence is there that vigorous advocacy for human rights has invaded the Congo?

In the Trump-Netanyahu duet, the quick claim, the headline posing receives attention. Ignore the false promises, “Peace to Ukraine in 24 hours”, “Ceasefire coming to Gaza”. Move to the next pictures, or the next “do as Trump says” threats.

Netanyahu’s proposal is an obscenity likely to be made worse if the world’s political elites, a compliant mainstream media and even sensation-loving social media devotees take it seriously.

Netanyahu is wanted for crimes against humanity. He leads a government unduly influenced by religious zealots who want the Palestinian people reduced to dust. Absorbed with Hamas whom he supported for 17 years but able to pretend that a previous 70 years of Israeli death and destruction in Palestine did not occur, the Israeli prime minister compounds these untruths with backing for an army which is allegedly the world’s most moral and never targets civilians.

For an adjudicating Nobel Committee, Netanyahu’s lying, his holier-than-thou visage, usually reduced to a swaggering smirk, cannot be ignored. Perceptions of the reliability and integrity of the proposers of candidates for peace awards can be weighed alongside evidence about the proposer’s particular candidate. Would you believe Netanyahu, or do you think he is enjoying the latest game in Washington as in finding the right oil to anoint Trump, thereby taking a potentially gullible public for a ride?

The Nobel and similar awards for peace assess criteria such as lifetime support for universal human rights, evidence that a nominee has been committed to the philosophy, language and practice of non-violence. To those criteria are usually added the need for a candidate to have shown unselfish, cosmopolitan-like support for international interests not just local or national ones.

Trump’s MAGA means to hell with anyone else’s interests except mine. What attention would that merit before any Nobel committee?

A president boasting of deporting millions of migrants to foreign prisons is committed to human rights? Who swallows that one?

A president disdainful of other countries’ interests, one who derides international treaties and removes every possible restriction on pollution of seas, land and atmosphere. How is that conceived as a commitment to peace?

A president happily maintaining the massive supply of arms to nuclear-armed Israel intent on slaughtering more Palestinian men, women and children may be listed as a nominee for a peace prize. Really?

Unless slaughter means respect for life, unless bullying is now the means of negotiation, unless unending threats of violence are accepted as pathways to peace, the world is being conned.

In deliberations about peace with justice, the marketing of sensation can be used to obscure truths. A tragi-comedy played out in the White House is the latest effort to grab headlines, deflect attention from horrendous inhumanities in Gaza, sustained by Netanyahu and Trump, aided and abetted by cowardly Western governments who have ducked for cover, and ignored their obligations to observe even the basic rules of international law.

The obscenities of bullying, violence, and continued pretence that a genocide has not occurred, have to end. So too, nations’ indifference to international humanitarian law.

Laughing to scorn the Netanyahu proposal to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize is an opportunity for the world’s commentators to show, “We will not be deceived any more. Those self-appointed kings in Washington have no clothes. We want to value human lives. We must and will take peace seriously.”

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.