I refer to the Malaysiakini report Rais urges UM to lift Ebadi speech ban .

Universiti Malaya's decision to bar Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel peace prize winner, has generated quite a frenzy from the usual people, the same who are likely to get riled up if Iranian president Ahmedinejad were to be invited to speak to the same students, or if some students were to protest any contact with the Zionist regime.

While one should not condone any action to ban either reading material or speakers from having access to the public, the issue has brought to light the whole hype about the award itself.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been based on political considerations; advancement of peace has had very little to do with it. The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel – after whom the award is named – reflects the irony of the situation - he invented explosives, hardly the stuff to promote peace.

This says much about the kind of peace envisaged by the Nobel prize selection committee. A quick glance at past recipients gives hints of its real nature; they have included indicted war criminals such as Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. With such a record, it should surprise no one if George Bush one day gets this dubious honour.

Among Muslims who have received the award are Anwar Sadat and Yasser Arafat, traitors to the cause of the Palestinians.

Even with all this, the selection of Shirin Ebadi of Iran as the 2003 recipient had surprised the selection committee’s dubious standards. Most Westerners had thought that the late Pope John Paul II, who was then bedridden, would win the award. Ebadi was not on their radar screen.

Most people were forced to ask, ‘Shirin who?’ Ebadi’s selection was akin to the Nobel prize for physics being awarded to a high-school physics teacher. What motivated the committee to choose her above 164 other candidates for that year’s award?

Then president Khatami of Iran pointed out that it was ‘political award’. Ebadi’s selection was based not on what she had done but where she lived and what her role was in that society vis-a-vis the established system. Post-Islamic Revolution Iran was the target of a vicious Western propaganda campaign.

Leading the charge, the US and Israel are targeting Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy programme and have goaded the International Atomic Energy Agency to pressure Tehran. Human rights is another arena where Islamic Iran is being targeted, never mind the fact that Iran is the only Muslim country in the Middle East to have a free and fair electoral process, as opposed to all the droppings of colonialism littering across the American-backed Arab world.

Iran’s fault is that it refuses to submit to the West’s dictates. If the Norwegian Nobel committee was really serious about awarding its peace prize to fighters for justice in the Muslim world, there would be many more suitable nominees, for instance lawyers who have defended victims of Muslim regimes' brutal persecution of its political opponents in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

But Mubarak of Egypt, the Saudi king Abdullah, and all the other tyrants, including the recently rehabilitated Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, are allies of the West. There, activists against the tyrannical regime are branded as ‘terrorists’. Hundreds are held in jails on trumped-up charges. The same situation exists in other favourite regimes of the West.

In the West, there are brave voices exposing the crimes being perpetrated by the US and Israel - these people in the US and indeed in Israel itself who struggle against such tyranny ought to be given some consideration. Names such as Ramsey Clark, David Cole, Noam Chomsky and Francis Boyle will never appear on the committee’s list for the Nobel peace prize. Never mind Jewish opponents of Zionism, such as Uri Davis and Uri Avnery.

Awarding the Nobel peace prize to Shirin Ebadi was an act of provocation against Iran and its Islamic system. Most people, Muslims and non-Muslims, Westerners and non-Westerners, have seen through the ruse and are not taken in by the ploy used. It is only the few whose literature does not go beyond paperback books on Islam by Bernard Lewis and his likes who make noise.

Having said all that, Ebadi, or whoever it is, should be allowed to speak. That is her right.