Blackwashing GMOs

Jonathan Matthews of GM Watch has written a terrific article on Monsanto's attempt to paint opponents of genetically modified food as racists and imperialists, a shameful effort for which they've enlisted the shameless Roy and Niger Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a phony civil-rights group that Glen Ford and Peter Gamble of The Black Commentator describe as:

[A] tin cup outstretched to every Hard Right political campaign or cause that finds it convenient - or a sick joke - to hire Black cheerleaders for their cross burning events.

For their pro-GMO jihad, the Innises have joined forces with Paul Driessen, an anti-environmental PR shill who's in bed with every rabid ultra-right lunatic from Ron Arnold to the Reverend Moon. As Matthews notes:

CORE itself has become increasingly controversial--and in some ways downright strange--since Roy Innis took its helm. Innis once branded opponents of racial segregation in the US as "house niggers", and dismissed the struggle against Apartheid as "a vicarious, romantic adventure" with "no honest base". When asked in 1973 why CORE supported Idi Amin despite the Ugandan president's hatred of Jewish people and praise of Hitler, Innis is reported to have said, "we have no records to prove if Hitler was a friend or an enemy of black people."

Innis has had no corresponding difficulty working out the enemy of black people when it comes to biotech. At Cancun his son Niger, a protégé of Armstrong Williams, handed out "lethal eco-imperialism" awards to the European Union and Greenpeace. But there was another award - an "Uncle Tom" award, presented in front of an audience of grinning corporate lobbyists and libertarians to the Malaysia-based Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific. PANAP is an organisation that works with small-scale and family farmers, peasants' movements, indigenous people, landless laborers and women in countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Innis denounced PANAP for "selling out its own people".

Read the whole article, by all means. And be sure to check out The Biotech Brigade, GM Watch's awe-inspiring database of intricately interconnected propagandists, think tanks, astroturf organizations, scientific hacks, and PR shills.