Venezuela’s Red Menace and Terror TV

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Venezuela’s Red Menace and Terror TV

Filed under: General News Commentary Weldon's Page— weldon berger @ 1:08 pm

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Florida Congressman Connie Mack is exercised by an alliance between Venezuela’s state-run Telesur television network and Al Jazeera, the largest Arab language television network. The deal to share content and expertise, says Mack, “has the effect of creating a global television network for terrorists and other enemies of freedom.” Both Al Jazeera and Telesur are frequently and vocally critical of US foreign policy, and Mack wants to create a counter-propaganda network to broadcast US-friendly messages into Venezuela.

Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez is not well-liked in Washington. The US government gave somewhat more than tacit approval to an abortive coup against Chavez in 2002 and continues to fund anti-Chavez organizations in Venezuela, and the specter of a socialist-leaning, anti-US leader in a major oil producing state continues to give Washington the willies. Chavez, who has won more democratic elections than has our own president, is described by the Bush administration as an anti-democratic strongman bent on exporting his subversive anti-capitalist, socialist agenda to the rest of Latin America (something he’s apparently good at, given the electoral success of leftist movements in Bolivia and Argentina).

His latest atrocity is depriving poor people in the northeast United States of the opportunity to choose between food or medicine and heating oil. Through Venezuela’s state-owned CITGO refining operations, Chavez is providing heavily discounted heating oil to low-income residents in six northeastern states — Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Vermont — with a seventh, New Jersey, reportedly queing up to participate. This trespass against decency is on a par with his efforts to impose universal education and health care initiatives upon the poor in his own country; it’s no wonder the Bush administration refuses to play his sordid game.

Mack’s plan to make US propaganda available to Venezuelans seems redundant, given that the Venezuelan media is solidly in the anti-Chavez camp. Indeed, the privately-owned television stations there supported the coup and refused to cover the collapse of it. And his hyperventilation over the business arrangement between Telesur and Al Jazeera seems at least ironic, if not moronic, given that the Arab network has served as a public diplomacy vehicle for Bush administration officials including Don Rumsfeld, Conoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and a host of lesser lights including various Penatgon and State Department deputies and undersecretaries, and the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID, which is one of the agencies funding anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela).

It’s hardly Al Jazeera’s fault that the message delivered by US officials through the network is not well received by its viewers.


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http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1198