El Diario columnist Vicky Pelaez
Posted on 06/29/2010 3:15:21 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The Rightosphere is well-acquainted with stories about the mainstream media working against US interests, but even so, this is still a bit much.
Less than a week after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited the United States, the Justice Department announced Monday that 10 people were arrested on charges of being Russian agents involved in a long-term mission in the country. Another suspect was still being sought.
Five of the arrested suspects appeared in a New York courtroom Monday. Four of the five, including a longtime U.S.-based columnist for the Spanish-language “El Diario” newspaper, were advised of their rights and ordered held due to flight risk, with their next hearing scheduled for July 1….
One of the suspects is Vicky Pelaez, a columnist for “El Diario” for more than 20 years covering politics, immigration and other issues, her lawyer confirmed. Pelaez is married to Juan Lazaro, another of the suspects arrested Monday, and the couple resided in Yonkers, a New York suburb.
Dig around the Internet and you’ll find a few choice nuggets written by Ms. Pelaez, mostly in Spanish. US prisons as modern-day slavery? Check. Arizona’s “unholy” immigration law as modern-day Nazi legislation? Check. The United States as wanton human rights violator? Check. We’ve been so unfair to so many other well-meaning, anti-imperialist nations, and it turns out that Ms. Pelaez just happens to have been a bit more pro-active in her advocacy for one or more of them.
So who has the US “targeted” in the past, particularly for economic and ideological blasphemies? Well… (I’ve tidied up the Google translation, which you can find here.)
During the past 34 years, the U.S. State Department annually issues a document about human rights in 194 countries. These report abuses, especially in nations that dare to come out of the ideological or the U.S. economic model. Naturally the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba were always favorite targets. Later, as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) advanced, it added Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. The economic disagreements with China led to complaints against it, and the same goes for Russia for its geopolitics, less and less subordinate.
I’m not going to belabor the absurdity of comparing Soviet, North Korean, Cuban, and Chinese human rights violations to our domestic political issues, nor specifically catalog all of the domestic abuses and assassinations committed by Ms. Pelaez’s apparent sponsor, Russia. And the notion that the US is facilitating the assemblage of some sort of “21st Century barbarism” in Guantanamo and elsewhere is so offensive to genuine victims of human savagery around the world — in Afghanistan where schoolgirls are butchered for learning, in the Sudan where families are burned alive for their religion and in the name of another religion, in Iran where protesters are gunned down, and in a whole host of countries where immense suffering continues with and without the cameras rolling, to yawning international interest — that the ludicrousness of suggesting a sort of “apples-to-apples” comparability to the US isn’t worth mentioning, but for the recognition that genuine victims exist and existed, and that their existence should not be mitigated by casual, and ultimately callous, comparisons.
No, what I find remarkable about Ms. Pelaez’s writings is how… unremarkable they, in fact, are. Each commentary I’ve cited above — America as slave-driving prison state, America as xenophobic racists, America as human rights hypocrite — is pretty much a derivative recitation of just some of the choicer themes in modern Leftist thought. That Pelaez felt comfortable writing about it at all even as she was spying for another country shows a curious misappreciation for the irony of her situation — charged to undermine a free and open America for the benefit of a not-so-free and not-so-open Russia, and doing so in some the free-est and open-est modes available. And might I add, not that creatively.
If Ms. Pelaez believed that Russia was more deserving of her allegiance than the US, she could have skipped the spying and just moved there. For her and her compatriots, that window appears to have closed. But at least she’ll have time to work on her writing.
El Diario columnist Vicky Pelaez
Paging Jimmy from Brooklyn. Google him. Nidia Valesquez; the list and the beat goes on...
LOL
Soviet disinformation is still alive and well. I had hoped it ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s damaged us immeasurably.
“If Ms. Pelaez believed that Russia was more deserving of her allegiance than the US, she could have skipped the spying and just moved there.”
oft repeated mantra.
But the fact is these lefties are committed to WORLD Communism. They don’t longingly look at Cuba, China, N Korea and wish they could live there because they could if they wanted. They are actively pulling down the free world to fit their twisted world view.
Odd how they don't want to live in an exiting "worker's paradise"...
Does ‘to each according to his needs’ have an upper limit?
This one appears to have the needs of a dozen North Koreans.
Maybe two dozen...
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