TEHRAN – In the Eastern lands where I live and teach as a university professor, there is no doubt that Gandhi, Mandela, and their peers stand as emblems of peace — figures I hold up to my students and my children as exemplars to learn from.

This year, the Nobel selection committee conferred the Peace Prize on María Corina Machado, a right-wing Venezuelan politician who has stood in full-throated support of the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.

Those sanctions have resulted in medicine shortages, runaway inflation, and the flight of millions of Venezuelans — shattering the quiet, everyday lives of ordinary, apolitical citizens.

In an absurdly revealing flourish, scarcely had the laurels been placed upon her head when, apparently anxious to avoid offending a certain petulant figure named Trump, she reached out to his son and declared that she would dedicate her prize to Trump.

She then messaged Trump himself: should he assist in removing Nicolás Maduro, she promised, privatizing the country’s oil companies would fling open the gates to Venezuela’s vast natural wealth for the United States.

She next rang Netanyahu, and pledged her wholehearted support for what that man — accused in international forums over atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East — is doing to confront what she alleges as Iran’s “malign influence.”

Alfred Nobel — the tormented inventor whose creation, dynamite, helped wreak slaughter on tens of thousands and whose conscience drove him to found this prize as a form of atonement — set forth in his will the unambiguous criteria for the Peace Prize:

“The prize shall be given to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, or for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

For this reason, I ask the committee charged with selecting the laureate to abandon, for next year, every shred of shame and restraint — and to name, this time, the devil himself as the final recipient of the award. I vow to you: no soul of sound mind would gasp in astonishment or raise a cry of protest.