Trump uses crude language about Norway at a Michigan rally

US President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday that he does not want to take in immigrants from Norway. He reportedly tied the reason to not having won the Nobel Peace Prize himself, and said he does not want “anyone from Norway.”

In the same speech, Trump said the unrest in France was the work of immigrants, adding that he would welcome newcomers from some countries, but not from Norway. He spoke of Norway in obscene terms: according to Reuters, he used the same label he has previously applied to Haiti, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

The dispute over the Nobel Prize

This year's Peace Prize went to South African jurist Navanethem Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. Trump has already questioned her merits in a long post in which he wrote that he himself had “ended eight wars” and that neither he nor anyone else had ever heard of Pillay.

In the same post he wrote that the leaders of countries he had helped were sending letters supporting him to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. He called the committee's decision “an indelible stain on Norway” and declared that the Peace Prize had been discredited forever by its decision.

Pillay, 85, is a South African jurist of Indian descent. She defended Nelson Mandela and other opponents of apartheid and worked at the Rwanda tribunal, where she took part in landmark rulings on the 1994 genocide, including those recognizing sexual violence as a possible instrument of genocide. She later headed the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and now serves at the International Court of Justice, which is hearing a genocide case against the authorities of Myanmar.

Despite Trump's attacks, the Norwegian government has repeatedly stressed that the Nobel Committee works independently and that the country's authorities have no influence on the choice of laureates.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz