If Al Gore and Arafat winning the Nobel prize weren’t proof enough …

… that the Nobel is worth about as much as the gum on the bottom of your tennis shoe, this should be:

MADRID, Spain (AP) – Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were “not that terrible” when compared to attacks by the IRA in Britain.

“September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible,” the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais.

“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.

And, of course, she hates Bush and Blair:

In the El Pais interview, Lessing had sharp words for both President Bush and his ally, former British premier Tony Blair.

“I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning,” El Pais quoted Lessing as saying. “Many of us hated Tony Blair, I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems and he did.”

“As for Bush, he’s a world calamity,” added Lessing. “Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars.”

She also essentially put Iran in the same category as Bush and Blair:

“I hate Iran, I hate the Iranian government, it’s a cruel and evil government,” she was quoted as saying.

“Look what happened to its president in New York, they called him evil and cruel in Colombia University. Marvelous! They should have said more to him! Nobody criticizes him, because of oil.”

The author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature earlier this month. She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.”

Lessing, I should point out, is 88 years old – and assuming this comment makes waves in the blogosphere and on the news, I look for the usual suspects to pull out the Absolute Moral Authority Card due to her age.

I believe self-important people like Lessing say things like this in an effort to try and diminish the significance of devastating events that impact the lives others to the extent that it forces people they don’t care for into acting in self-defense. That way, if the idea that the devastating event was ‘no big deal in the scheme of things’ catches root (and in fact it already has, if you pay attention to far lefties in academia), the basis has been formed for yet another criticism of the forceful response to the ‘non-significant’ event. In essence, what Lessing is saying here is “Put it into perspective. If you had to go through what Ireland went through, THEN you’d know what terror feels like.” While it’s true the US hasn’t experienced a series of terror attacks on its own soil over the past 30 years, there have been many well-documented attacks on US citizens and interests overseas which date back at least 30 years, if not more. That’s not to mention all the other countless terror attacks that the same type of Islamofascists who murdered 3,000 on 9-11 have perpetrated on innocents around the world, attacks they committed well before 9-11, all in the name of Islam.

She’s also employing the “number of victims” argument, as if to suggest that because there were more victims of IRA terror than victims on 9-11, then that means that the US hasn’t suffered “that much” in comparison. That type of argument shouldn’t even be dignified with a response.

I’d like for Ms. Lessing to tell the family of Peter Edward Mardikian, or any other victim of 9-11, that those attacks were “not that terrible” when compared to the IRA bombings.

Lastly, I wonder if it’s even crossed Ms. Lessing’s “brilliant” mind that the two world leaders she hates the most – Bush and Blair – responded in the manner they did to the 9-11 attacks not just to prevent potential future large-scale attacks on innocents at home and abroad, but also in an effort to prevent small-scale attacks on innocent people at home, small scale attacks similar to the ones carried out by the IRA on unsuspecting people, and like the ones carried out by Palestinian terrorists against Israelis on buses, in malls, and other places where you’ll find groups of Israelis gathered. Ironically, Bush’s and Blair’s efforts to prevent the types of attacks she says were “worse” than 9-11 are, to her, all done in an effor to “profit” from war, and are therefore “wrong.”

So Lessing has “visionary power”? Well, Dionne Warwick supposedly had “visionary power,” too, so that’s not exactly saying much.

Update: Dafydd at Big Lizards minces no words in his post on Lessing’s remarks.