Leftist guru Noam Chomsky has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

This is yet more proof that we live in an age in which “peace prizes” are worth less than the prizes kids find at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes.

Look at the case of President Barack Obama. A few months after he was inaugurated, Obama, who is now presiding over three wars on two continents, received a Nobel Peace Prize. His most significant accomplishment when nominations for the prize closed on Feb. 1, 2009, just 12 days into his term of office, had been to throw a Super Bowl party.

The Godfather of Terror, Yasser Arafat, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Serial liar Rigoberta Menchu, a Communist agent who worked for the same terrorists who later killed members of her own family, somehow hornswoggled her way into one in 1992.

Now, the lesser-known Sydney Peace Prize has been awarded to the Chomsky, who routinely argues that the United States is worse than Hitler’s Germany and consorts with genocidal Jew-hating terrorists. It is unclear which peace Chomsky, a soft-spoken version of Ward Churchill, has actually secured.

“The choice of Noam Chomsky continues a pattern of Sydney Peace Prize recipients who have demonstrated questionable credentials as legitimate peace-makers,” said Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. “It does nothing to enhance the standing of either the recipient or the prize itself.”

The Australian honor, awarded in 2003 to Palestinian terrorism apologist Hanan Ashrawi, was bestowed on Chomsky “for inspiring the convictions of millions about a common humanity and for unfailing moral courage.”

Perhaps in the leftist lexicon “moral courage” is the same as shrugging off the murder of innocent Americans. If so, then Professor Chomsky certainly deserves the prize.

Because Chomsky considers America to be “the world’s greatest terrorist state,” he finds it difficult to get around to condemning those who kill Americans for political purposes.

When Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan last month, Chomsky was brokenhearted. It’s understandable: a few years ago, the al-Qaeda chieftain followed the lead of Hugo Chavez and praised Chomsky as “one of the most capable” citizens of the United States.

Chomsky repaid bin Laden by defending him with characteristic aplomb.

Sounding like an ACLU lawyer, Chomsky protested the “planned assassination” of bin Laden which he said contravened international law. “There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim,” he said.

Moreover, he opined that the U.S. decision to bury bin Laden’s body in Davy Jones’s locker was provoking and angering Muslims, a definite no-no in the rarefied world of pontificating Marxist academics.

The crimes of the dead al-Qaeda leader who destroyed the World Trade Center were insignificant compared to those committed by President George W. Bush, Chomsky wrote. “We might ask how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at his compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

“Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a ‘suspect’ but uncontroversially the ‘decider’ who gave the orders to commit the ‘supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’ [quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal] for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.”

Maybe the idea that Bush was worse than bin Laden was considered uncontroversial at a meeting of one of the Marxist groups to which the ayatollah of the left belongs. One of theses associations, known as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, incidentally, is currently campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize for Stalinist songbird Pete Seeger.

It’s just a matter of time before CCDS or another radical group starts a petition to have Chomsky awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative reporter. His new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, was published by WND Books. Incidentally, the book contains an interview with Noam Chomsky, a longtime ACORN supporter.