Nobel Literature Winner: '9/11 Not So Bad'

The Nobel Committee that decides who gets their literature award has had an anti-American field day these last few years. The 2006 recipient, playwright Harold Pinter, is a hard-line socialist whose unhinged anti-American, anti-western poetry and writings are just par for the course when it comes to recent Nobel literature winners.

This year's recipient is no exception. Doris Lessing's outspoken criticisms of American foreign policy and American culture are in perfect harmony with what apparently is one of the requirements for winning the literature prize; a cockeyed view of the United States:

"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said in an interview published Sunday.

"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was (attending). People forget," she said.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. About 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were maimed in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which caused most of the deaths, disarmed in 2005.

The Nobel Committee awarded Lessing the prize for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power." They might have included her "lack of moral clarity" and "extraordinary denseness" in the citation as well.