Now, that wasn’t very smart, was it, Mr. Fowle?

My working assumption about Jeffrey Fowle had been that no believing Christian would have intentionally left a Bible next to a toilet, but evidently, I was mistaken about that. I wonder whether the Bible in question was even translated into Korean, but either way, Fowle’s tactical decision to waste thousands of dollars from his modest municipal salary to nonchalantly place one Bible next to a toilet … in Chongjin puts him firmly in the same category as the South Korean missionaries who chartered a shiny new bus to Outer Talibanistan without a Pashto speaker among them.

Fowle did catch one lucky break–he has been un-fired from his job, on condition that he stay the f … stay out of North Korea, and presumably Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, for good measure.

I can only hope that during Fowle’s five months in the Pyongyang Hilton, he had enough time to reconsider the merits of his strategy, and perhaps even to dissuade others from following suit. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new career as a de-motivational speaker.

The main legacy of Fowle’s stunt—along with the “adventures” of two other American hostages—was to help North Korea extort the U.S. government, and to force our Special Envoy for Human Rights, Robert King, to spend the better part of year playing hostage negotiator instead of, say, pushing the U.N. to denounce North Korea’s oppression of Christians. Nice going, guys.

Look, if you really want to help fight religious persecution in North Korea, join The Jubilee Campaign. If you want to help slip a message into North Korea past the censors, for God’s sake, don’t go to North Korea, spend a third as much money on a vacation to Ft. Lauderdale and donate the other two-thirds to Free North Korea Radio, through the North Korean Freedom Coalition.