Reading today’s editorial by Jenni Monet at Indian Country Today, I was taken aback by the misleading headline and demonizing rhetoric of her character assassination of Venezuelan President Chavez. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought ICT was working for the CIA.
As I noted in my comment on her lengthy and vitriolic criticism of Chavez,
While Chavez, like any head of state, needs to be scrutinized for abiding by international human rights law, the assumption that determinations by OAS or the UN human rights bodies are somehow above politics is not born out. If the standard for human rights compliance is abiding by human rights declarations and conventions, then few countries in the world come up short more often than the United States.
As for supposedly trustworthy NGOs like Human Rights Watch, their complicity in US State Department propaganda aimed at furthering US hegemony at the expense of indigenous sovereignty and human rights should give us pause in knee-jerk reactions to demonizing rhetoric with loaded, red-baiting terms. Leave that to warmongering proteges of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, like the new head of Amnesty International Suzanne Nossel.
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