Search Results for: Christine Hong

December 29, 2014

Christine Hong has been curiously silent about North Korea’s racism

By now, most of you have probably read that North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency, referring to President Obama’s failure to censor “The Interview,” said that “Obama Reckless always in words and Deeds Goes like a Monkey in a Tropical Forest.” (KCNA.kp is unlinkable, but I’ve pasted the full article below the fold. The article in question is dated December 27, 2014.) This is the third racist attack on President Obama KCNA has printed, and the second it has printed...

Categories Racism/Useful Idiocy
January 6, 2014

Christine Hong really should tell us what she thinks about Kim Jong Un’s sweet new ski resort.

Kim Jong Un’s reign must be a dark time for North Korea’s apologists on the far left. Those who elevate equality above all other values (or say they do) must be hard pressed to find solidarity with a regime that has imposed the world’s most obscene case of economic and social injustice. Under Kim Jong Il, North Korea was no paragon of socialist equality. Since his dynastic succession, Kim Jong Un has added the arch-heresies of gaudy consumerism and an...

Categories Fiskings/Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy
April 30, 2014

Eagerly awaiting Christine Ahn’s reaction to North Korea’s sexism and homophobia

Now that North Korea’s state media have called South Korea’s female president a “whore,” a “prostitute,” a “crazy bitch,” and a “comfort woman,” no one will ever have to invent sexism again to deflect criticism of North Korea’s crimes against humanity, and whoever does will, from this date forward, have to argue her away around real, vicious, state-sponsored misogyny. What Park did before Obama this time reminds one of an indiscreet girl who earnestly begs a gangster to beat someone or a capricious whore who asks her...

Categories Anju Links/North-South/Propaganda/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
November 4, 2009

Christine Ahn: Above Criticism! (Or, “Help! Help! I’m Being Repressed!”)

Christine Ahn is feeling picked on, reports the Oakland East Bay Express, an alt-lefty rag with a room-temperature circulation.  Writer Kathleen Wentz informs us that Ms. Ahn guards the privacy of her views jealously when she’s not on CNN, a book tour, the lecture circuit, or hectoring congressional staffers: As a longtime peace activist and progressive, Christine Ahn was used to being on the ideological fringe. But even she wasn’t prepared to be red-baited and called a supporter of dictatorship....

Categories Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy
July 27, 2009

Yachting the River Styx and the Lies of Christine Ahn

Several of you e-mailed me about the story of the luxury yachts that North Korea had attempted to purchase from the Italian manufacturer Azimuth-Benetti.  I started a post and didn’t finish it, partially because that post became something long-winded, disjointed, and unpublishable.  Meanwhile, a few more details have trickled in about the boats and the purchase.  Contrary to doubts expressed in earlier reports, Italian authorities have concluded that the boats were indeed for His Withering Majesty, although you have to...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
January 9, 2000

The Alternative Reality of Christine Ahn

Dave at No Illusions wants to know more about Christine Ahn, the North Korean apologist (and American, as it turns out) whose views OhMyNews found worthy of the extensive interview I linked and fisked below. Even a cursory exploration of Christine Ahn’s views immediately raises questions about the honesty of OhMyNews’s coverage of her, given its failure to disclose that she is an active member in a pro-Pyongyang organization based in Oakland, California. Who Is Christine Ahn? North Korea is...

Categories Uncategorized
January 8, 2000

The Alternative Reality of Christine Ahn

Dave at No Illusions wants to know more about Christine Ahn, the North Korean apologist (and American, as it turns out) whose views OhMyNews found worthy of the extensive interview I linked and fisked below. Even a cursory exploration of Christine Ahn’s views immediately raises questions about the honesty of OhMyNews’s coverage of her, given its failure to disclose that she is an active member in a pro-Pyongyang organization based in Oakland, California. Who Is Christine Ahn? North Korea is...

Categories Uncategorized
November 6, 2014

Donald Gregg’s weird, surreal, sad spectacle

In all the stages of North Korea’s reaction to U.N. action on the Commission of Inquiry report, none was quite so surreal as an event held on Monday, October 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. There, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea and Cheonan conspiracy theorist Donald Gregg moderated a “conversation” about human rights with North Korean diplomat (I use the term advisedly) Jang Il Hun. If that seems about as wise as inviting Larry Flynt...

Categories Anju Links
July 25, 2014

Open Sources, July 25, 2014

~ 1 ~ NK NEWS has an extensive report about H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act. Your correspondent is interviewed at length, as is Christine Hong, to provide an opposing view. I have to say, I’m rather pleased with that choice myself, because it gives me an opening to present a short list of the neocons who’ve co-sponsored H.R. 1771: Elliot Engel, Loretta Sanchez, Karen Bass, Linda Sanchez, Chaka Fattah, Gerry Connolly, Jim McDermott, Jim Moran, Tulsi Gabbard,...

Categories Anju Links
June 16, 2014

Open Sources, June 16, 2014

~   1   ~ Congressional Hearing, June 18th: “Human Rights Abuses and Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea.” The briefer will be Ambassador Lee Jung-Hoon, South Korea’s Ambassador for Human Rights. I’m rather interested in Lee’s answers, because I see no evidence that either the U.S. or South Korea intends to offer a credible policy response to the Commission of Inquiry’s report. If you wonder just how much the South Korean government is embracing and acting on the COI’s...

Categories Anju Links
April 22, 2014

N. Korea keeps it classy, calls Chair of U.N. Commission “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality”

Last week, the Honorable Michael Kirby, a retired Justice of the High Court of Australia, and the Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry for Human Rights in North Korea, was in Washington. It was my honor to be invited to two events with Justice Kirby — a small-group breakfast meeting (Kirby called this is a “barbarous” custom) hosted by the Australian Embassy, and a small-group dinner hosted by a member of the Board of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea....

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/WTF?
January 17, 2013

Open Sources, Jan. 17, 2012

NORTH KOREA PERESTROIKA WATCH:  First it was lipstick, now it’s bicycles.  Where are Christine Ahn and Christine Hong to defend North Korean women against sexism? *          *          * I’VE HAD A LOT TO SAY ABOUT NORTH KOREA’S METH PROBLEM, but this article on North Koreans smoking pot was interesting.  You wouldn’t think pot would catch on in a place without freely available snacks, and where being mellow is strictly forbidden.  *      ...

Categories Anju Links
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012. Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality. I couldn’t help quoting two of them. The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
August 3, 2010

The Peace Train Stops at Al-Jazzeera

Professor Sung Yoon Lee is a friend of mine, and this is why friends don’t let friends go on Al Jazzeera. When the floodlights snap on, you just might find yourself in a circus tent. In the extreme opposite corner, we have present “Professor” of Pacific Rim Studies Christine Hong, who appears to a an exact genetic clone of her comrade in the struggle, Christine Ahn, right down to the hip, urbane glasses (damn you to hell, Hwang Woo-Seok!). The...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Useful Idiocy
August 22, 2022

No, North Korea did not “manage” COVID. It piled famine on plague.

The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I’m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un’s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the country’s health care system,” concede its widespread malnutrition, and lack of a COVID...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Health & Disease
November 19, 2018

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
June 20, 2017

How to hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s death

In North Korean prisons (at least, in those from which release is possible at all) when the guards conclude that a prisoner is about to die, they release her and send her away to die at home, so that disposing of her body will be someone else’s problem, and so that the warden can manipulate the camp’s rate of in-custody deaths downward. (Perhaps in some small way, even the wardens of North Korean prisons fear being held accountable, one day,...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions/U.S. Law