TOM GROSS: DISPATCHES
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001754.html
This is one of an occasional series of dispatches that doesn’t concern the Middle East, though it does concern the media.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become friends with a number of North Korean exiles and dissidents that I’ve met over the years when I was speaking on the Middle East at international human right conferences. The suffering they have described is horrific. (In the past, I have criticized the media, in particular the New York Times, for all but ignoring human rights in North Korea.)
I attach two pieces, one from yesterday’s Washington Post, the other from today’s Wall Street Journal. (Both are by subscribers to this list.) There are extracts first, and then a short note on anti-Israel, pro-North Korean regime western academics and writers.
EXTRACTS
NOT ONE OF THE SPICE GIRLS
Max Boot writes:
Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the despot Kim Jong Un, is being treated as if she were one of the Spice Girls. A headline blared: “Kim Jong Un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.” One article claimed: “North Korea has emerged as the early favorite to grab one of the Winter Olympics’ most important medals: the diplomatic gold.” Another declared: “They marveled at her barely-there makeup and her lack of bling. They commented on her plain black outfits and simple purse. They noted the flower-shaped clip that kept her hair back in a no-nonsense style.” …
The breathless coverage given to Kim Yo Jong’s visit is not only vapid, it is dangerous and disgusting. This is the modern-day equivalent of celebrating Paula Hitler, Adolf’s sister, or Joseph Stalin’s children, except that Kim Yo Jong is more complicit in totalitarianism than they were.
A UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014 that concluded that North Korea is guilty of “crimes against humanity,” including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation… The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”
HER DAY JOB
Claudia Rosett writes:
Ms. Kim, with her freckles and enigmatic smile, is a trained and trusted royal brainwasher for a family regime whose court is built on totalitarian lies. Her admirers in the media ought to be impressed by the professionalism with which she snookered them…
Missing from most of the media coverage was any detail about Ms. Kim’s day job in Pyongyang. In North Korea this kid sister has served under Big Brother as a deputy director of the powerful and omnipresent Propaganda and Agitation Department. She has apparently racked up a record so stellar that last year the U.S. Treasury blacklisted her as a top North Korean official tied to “notorious abuses of human rights.” …
A detailed report published last year by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, described the Propaganda and Agitation Department as playing “a key role in justifying Kim family rule through domestic and external propaganda.” They added that entire families may be punished if one member is suspected of dissent. The aim is to ensure the survival, glorification and total power of the Kim regime and its hereditary tyrant.
That’s the training and family tradition behind Ms. Kim’s visit to South Korea. Her delegation included plenty of backup, such as Choe Hwi, a vice director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department who has been blacklisted by the U.S. (and the U.N.) for human-rights abuses. The Treasury noted that Mr. Choe “has reportedly been responsible for maintaining ideological purity.” Currently he is chairman of North Korea’s National Sports Guidance Committee.
DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE: HITLER, STALIN AND MAO, AND OTTO WARMBIER
Tom Gross adds:
Just as plenty of western academics defended Hitler, Stalin and Mao, there are some American and west European professors who defend the North Korean regime – and as I have pointed out, they tend to be the very same ones who are the leading lights of anti-Israel movements on campus.
For example, I wrote in this dispatch about virulent anti-Israel activist Kathy Dettwyler, a professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, who wrote that young American-Jewish student Otto Warmbier, who went on a tourist trip to North Korea while on a study abroad program in China, only be arrested on fabricated charges of taking down a poster, tortured, and returned brain dead last year by North Korea, “got exactly what he deserved”.
In another dispatch last year, I pointed out that North Korea was hosting French Muslim anti-Semitic “comedian” Dieudonné whose “jokes” mock and deride Holocaust victims, and, Franco-Swiss author and director Alain Soral, a former communist who was then kicked out of the French far-right National Front for his repeated extreme anti-Semitism, including saying “Hitler should have finished the job”.
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