Madleen Gaza Crew awarded the 2025 Leif Eiriksson Peace Award

The Leif Eiriksson Peace Award was received on behalf of the Madleen crew by Reva Viard and Omar Faiad at the Mirpuri Foundation International Sailing Trophy event in Cascais Portugal on the 4th July 2025. It was broadcast live on Aljazera arabic channel.

Ladies and gentlemen

I am Thor Magnusson, founder of the Peace 2000 Institute in Reykjavik Iceland. In the year 1000 an Icelandic viking Leif Eiriksson set sails to the west and found America. It was also this year that the vikings made a pact of peace at the Icelandic Althing which is currently the oldest working democratic assembly in the world.

The same year, the Vikings of Iceland agreed to solve their differences on religion peacefully and lay down their arms at the Althing. This became the cornerstone of a culture of peace that has lasted ever since. While violent wars plagued the world, Icelanders became the only nation in the world to never carry weapons.

The Leif Eiriksson Peace Award is presented to those people around the world who today carry on this culture of peace. The first Leif Eiriksson Peace Award was presented in 2001 to Gabriel Wolff, a young Israeli soldier who was imprisoned for bravely resisting to hold a gun against his fellow citizens.

Today we are awarding the Leif Eiriksson Peace Award to the courageous crew of the Madleen yacht that sailed across the Mediterranean towards Gaza loaded with food, medicine, and a powerful message to the world.

Open up a sea corridor from Europe to Gaza for unhindered humanitarian aid and freedom to the two million people that are enclaved in a small strip of land without food, water and other necessities to sustain a basic human life.

During world war two people were rounded up based on their ethnic background and put in ghettos and concentration camps to eliminate them from this world. History has been a hard judge of the regime that did this to their fellow human beings. We have called it the holocaust and said never again.

Why are we allowing this shame on humanity to be repeated in the middle east today without the lawmakers of the world doing anything productive to stop it? None of us can say we don't know about it. Starving children and hundreds of people being murdered while waiting for food handouts is being live streamed to our social media. More than hundred thousand people have been murdered in the last two years and two million people are facing extinction. Facing a repeated holocaust. How do you go to sleep at night knowing about this fate of your fellow humans? It’s disgusting and should be enough for us all to rise and say now this stops.

I appeal to you all, to all the sailors attending the Mirpuri annual sailing trophy, to set sails for Gaza and put an end to this tragic situation. Every action starts with one voice. One step. You can take the next step. Lets go with boats and aeroplanes to demand opening up of sea and airspace to bring humanitarian aid and freedom to the people suffering a genocide today in front of our eyes in Gaza. Let's start planning now, at this sailing trophy weekend and set sail this month, next month, and christmas. Lets unite in humanity and dignity and say to the penetrators, the politicians in regimes supporting such genocide, the soldiers carrying out their illegal orders, that we will not tolerate this anymore. We are coming after them to make sure they will answer for their war crimes. Lets demand a new Nurnberg trial. Nobody is above the law.

Now I would like to ask the representatives of the Madleen crew that are with us here today, Rima Hassan and Omar Fahid, to come here to receive the 2025 Leif Eiriksson Peace Award.